IMMAs celebrated – yet now in danger

Oct. 24th, 2023. Ten years ago, on this day, the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force was launched at the International Marine Protected Area Congress (IMPAC3) in Marseille. At that time, it was a distant dream to establish a scientific process, drawing on masses of published and unpublished data, to bring together disparate groups of whale and other marine mammal scientists to identify the most important habitats of these wide-ranging species.

“We wanted to give voice to the marine mammal scientific community—those interested in spatial protection for whales as well as to the whales and other marine mammals themselves,” says Erich Hoyt co-chair and co-founder of the Task Force with Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara.

“To do that,” Notarbartolo di Sciara adds, “we needed a simple but authoritative conservation tool that marine spatial planners, marine protected area practitioners, government, industry, conservation groups and scientists could use to give whales, dolphins and other marine mammals a place at the negotiating table. That way, at least there could be a chance of gaining protected habitat.”

After obtaining funding from the governments of Germany and France, followed by several NGOs, in 2016, the Task Force began steadily moving around the global ocean. To date, the Task Force has examined 72% of the ocean and identified 242 Important Marine Mammal Areas, or IMMAs.

The Task Force membership itself has grown—currently with more than 60 members spread across the world—with the day-to-day IMMA work being run by an eight-member Secretariat.

Each IMMA has gone through an expert nomination process from scientists followed by peer review. Nearly 300 scientists have been involved in one or more of the week-long workshops held now in 10 regions, thereafter, becoming enrolled as IMMA ambassadors, the keenest of which volunteer as IMMA coordinators for their region.

IMMAs are defined as discrete portions of habitat, important to marine mammal species, that have the potential to be delineated and managed for conservation. They are not legal designations but independent, peer-reviewed assessments based on a set of criteria supported by scientific data. In essence, however, IMMAs are a hands-on tool that facilitates conservation.

Since 2022 through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, countries have agreed to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. At the same time, the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty agreement is now in the process of gaining support from countries to protect biodiversity in international waters. These agreements, fueled by the urgency to address the global biodiversity crisis and climate emergency, have raised the stakes to provide hands-on conservation tools for policy makers and government.

To date, nearly 600 downloads of the IMMA shape files and associated information have been accessed by users around the world. IMMAs are now in the process of being used in spatial planning in Malaysia, the creation of marine protected areas in Bangladesh and Vietnam, by the US Navy to avoid using low-frequency sonar near IMMAs, and in the establishment of Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas (PSSAs) under the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) in the western Mediterranean where sperm and fin whales get hit by ships. Several shipping companies transiting south of Crete and across the Indian Ocean are also using IMMAs for route planning on a voluntary basis to reduce the risk of hitting large whales.

In addition, the Task Force, working with Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) in the UK, has initiated a systematic project to monitor and examine the prospects for practical management measures in IMMAs in Kenya, Malaysia and Peru, eventually to be expanded to many more IMMAs.