Whales could be a breakthrough in climate change.

The potential of whales to capture carbon is truly startling.

Peter Miles
Age of Awareness
Published in
4 min readJul 2, 2021

--

Ban Whaling, people sign Japanese flag to stop whaling, Melbourne, 2007. Image — John Englart, Flickr, Creative Commons.

One whale is worth thousands of trees, begins a December 2019 journal article by Chami and others, titled ‘Nature’s Solution to Climate Change’. The article proposes the strategy of fixing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by increasing the whale population, particularly the great whales, the baleen and sperm whales.

Each great whale can fix on average 30 tons of carbon, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and at the end of its 60-year life that carbon sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it supports deep sea ecosystems and is incorporated into the ocean sediment.

Present whale populations are estimated to be only 3% to 25% of what they once were, depending on species, caused by over hunting in the past. There is great potential to increase whale populations once fully protected.

Near where I live in Southern Australia whales are regularly sighted, in June, July, August, close to the coast, within a few hundred metres, they come to mate, calf and socialize . It is wonderful to see them and it is widely reported on radio news. Just the other day a large Southern Right Whale (so called because they were the right ones to hunt) and her calf were seen. The concerning part is that they are so few and although increasing in numbers, hundreds probably came prior to all the whale hunting.

Protecting more whales will need to be funded, possibly through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations REDD program, Reducing Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation, which funds the preservation of carbon-capturing ecosystems.

Currently whales, in addition to some hunting, are also killed by collisions with shipping. Funding could be directed to shipping companies to compensate them for the extra cost of longer routes to avoid whales.

There is also the problem of entanglement in fishing nets, waterborne plastic waste, and noise pollution, so there is a lot of work to do.

--

--

Peter Miles
Age of Awareness

45 years in Environmental Science, B.Env.Sc. in Wildlife & Conservation Biology. Writes on Animals, Plants, Soil & Climate Change. environmentalsciencepro.com