An unlikely truce with the great whales, 40 years on

For most of the 20th century, the fate of whales was treated as an industrial question. How many could be taken, how fast, and by whom. Biology entered the discussion late. Ethics later still. By the time international negotiations began to seriously address the problem, many whale populations had already been reduced to remnants of their former size. Some species were approaching the point where recovery was uncertain.

Against that background, the global moratorium on commercial whaling stands out as an improbable decision. Agreed in 1982 and taking effect in January 1986, it asked countries with long whaling traditions to stop hunting animals that had underpinned coastal economies and national identities. The vote, taken under the auspices of the International Whaling Commission, reached the three-quarters majority required to pass. That it did so at all remains striking.

“The ban has literally saved the great whales from extinction, and is one of the most important global conservation measures ever implemented,” Clare Perry, a senior adviser with the Environmental Investigation Agency, told Mongabay’s Edward Carver. She described its passage as “the defining moment in the IWC’s history.”

The commission itself had begun life in 1946 as what Perry called a “whaler’s club,” made up of the dominant hunting nations of the day. It now has 88 members and an explicit conservation mandate. When the moratorium was adopted, commercial whaling was already in decline. Overexploitation had hollowed out stocks, costs were rising, and public attitudes were shifting. Some fleets had ceased operations before the ban came into force.

Still, opposition was firm. Japan, Norway and Iceland voted against the measure and remain the only countries to have conducted commercial whaling since the late 1980s. The IWC lacks enforcement power, and compliance has always relied on diplomacy and pressure. “If parties don’t follow it, there’s not much that can be done,” Erich Hoyt of the International Union for Conservation of Nature told Mongabay. A 2014 ruling by the International Court of Justice against Japan’s Antarctic program shifted the balance. Japan later withdrew from the IWC and ended that hunt.

Four decades on, whales face different dangers. Entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships now kill far more animals than harpoons do. Bycatch alone is estimated to kill more than 300,000 cetaceans each year. The moratorium did not solve these problems. What it did do was buy time.

It was a pause imposed on an extractive habit that had seemed permanent. That pause allowed populations to stabilize, and in some cases to grow again. The decision required governments to act before certainty, and to accept restraint without clear short-term reward. Conservation has rarely been so clear-eyed, or so consequential.