Sea Alarm’s coordination of preparedness building in the Netherlands saw the development of a new national wildlife response plan and further strengthening of the NGO network governance.
HELCOM maintains its position as the most advanced Regional Agreement in Europe when it comes to oiled wildlife preparedness and response policy. This year, Expert Working Group Meetings have continued, an online seminar on cross border cooperation in wildlife incidents was held and a number of important proposals have been discussed and adopted by HELCOM Response.
In 2020, as part of our ongoing work to provide information on oiled wildlife response preparedness in all the coastal countries of the world, we updated 11 Country Wildlife Response Profiles (Mozambique, China, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Vietnam, Panama, Singapore, Romania, Spain and the USA) and created new profiles for Lebanon, our 107th, and Malta, our 108th.
In our last 20-year anniversary article (Part 1) we introduced the importance of networking, the role Sea Alarm has had in initiating and coordinating NGO Response networks and reviewed the history of the European Network EUROWA. In Part 2, we continue the story, presenting the work of the Global Oiled Wildlife Response System (GOWRS) and some closing words on the significance of these networks, which leave the world better prepared for oiled wildlife response.
Network is a word that is used a lot nowadays, but what is a network? For Sea Alarm, it is a group of organisations and/or individuals with a common interest working together. We have a strong belief that by cooperating and striving towards common goals, a well-coordinated network can grow to be stronger than the sum of its parts (in other words, its individual members).
At the turn of the new millennium, Sea Alarm was still a young organisation aiming to bring more professionalism into the field of oiled wildlife response by working in cooperation with animal care specialists, governments and industry stakeholders. This journey to professionalism, marked by a number of serious oil spills, was not a smooth one.
Sea Alarm has played an active role in motivating European Coastal States to explore the issue of Oiled Wildlife Response and Preparedness via the three major Regional Agreements: “Bonn”, “HELCOM” and “Barcelona”. This article provides an overview of these efforts, and what has been achieved over the years.
Throughout its 20 years of existence, Sea Alarm has assisted many European countries by motivating, initiating, informing and facilitating national processes, with the aim of raising awareness and improving response planning and capacity building.
Sea Alarm organised and facilitated an IPIECA workshop in Cyprus in November 2019, under the auspices of the IPIECA Oil Spill Group. The workshop brought together oil company decision-makers and subject matter experts who have an influence on oiled wildlife planning within their companies.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, conferences everywhere are being cancelled, however, the Arctic Preparedness Platform for Oil Spill and Other Environmental Accidents (APP4SEA) elected to hold a Twitter conference, at which Sea Alarm was an invited participant.
Spanish oiled wildlife response stakeholders came together on 3 and 4 March 2020 in Madrid at the headquarters of the Fundación Biodiversidad for an oiled wildlife workshop focused on improving processes for oiled wildlife response at the regional and national level.