ASCOBANS

2002

June 2002: Jastarnia Plan finalized

The 9th Meeting of the Advisory Committee, held in Hindås, Sweden, put the finishing
touches to the ASCOBANS Recovery Plan for Baltic harbour Porpoises. The plan, which is also known as the Jastarnia Plan for the Polish town where a workshop to draft it was convened in January 2002, was submitted to Parties in Esbjerg, Denmark, in August 2003. The objectives of the plan are to:

Implement precautionary management measures immediately to reduce the bycatch rate to two or fewer porpoises per year in the portion of the Baltic that was surveyed in 1995;

improve knowlege in key subject areas as quickly as possible;

develop more refined (quantitative) recovery targets as new information becomes available on population status, bycatch and other threats.

It is hoped that the implementation of this plan will contribute to averting a further decline of the Baltic harbour porpoise population, estimated to number approximately 600 individuals.

The Jastarnia Plan is available as a PDF file on the "documents" page of this website.

June 2002, ASCOBANS AC 9, Hindås, Sweden, 10 - 12 June 2002

The 9th Meeting of the Advisory Committe took place from 10 - 12 June in Hindås (near Gothenburg) Sweden). It was attended by 50 representatives from eight Parties, three Non-Party Range States and numerous intergovernmental and nongovernmental observer organisations, including scientists, fisheries experts and conservationists. In addition to finalizing the ASCOBANS Recovery Plan for Baltic Harbour Porpoises (Jastarnia Plan), the meeting dealt with various other questions such as bycatch mitigation throughout the Agreement area and abundance survey planning.

January 2002, Jastarnia Plan to Save Baltic Harbour Porpoises

From 9 - 11 January 2002 ASCOBANS, in cooperation with Hel Marine Station and the Foundation for the Development of the University of Gdansk (Fundacja Roswoju Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego, FRUG) organized a workshop in Jastarnia, Poland. This workshop was aimed at drafting a recovery plan for Baltic harbour porpoises. With only some 600 animals believed to remain in the Baltic, this species, the only native species of cetaceans in the Baltic, is highly endangered and action is urgently required to prevent a further detetrioration of their conservation status and a recovery plan is a long-standing aim of ASCOBANS.

Thanks to the positive and cooperative spirit that prevailed in Jastarnia and the hard work of all participants of the workshop, we are now close to reaching this goal. Considerable progress was made towards laying the groundwork for the recovery plan. After three days of intensive, constructive and fruitful discussions the workshop produced a number of recommendations. Based on this input, the chairman, Dr Randall R. Reeves, produced a Draft Recovery Plan (Jastarnia Plan), for review by Parties and Range States at AC9 with a view to having it adopted by MoP4 in Esbjerg, Denmark in August 2003.

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