Sea Alarm was active in the month-long response to wildlife affected by the Bow Jubail oil spill in Rotterdam Harbour, the Netherlands, coordinating the work of Dutch, European, and global responders in the care of more than 500 oiled swans.
Sea Alarm is headed to the 13th International Effects of Oil on Wildlife (EOW), held this year in Baltimore, USA. We hope to see you there.
Work has begun on the oiled wildlife response programme introduced in our December 2017 newsletter.
As of October 2017, the leadership of a five-year (2017-2022) oiled wildlife programme has been contracted to Sea Alarm.
In October 2017, the HELCOM Expert Working Group on Oiled Wildlife Response organized a three-day event which included a working group meeting, wildlife response manager training and a stakeholder exchange of current activities and good practices.
Sea Alarm’s Hugo Nijkamp attended a workshop for authority representatives on the existing arrangements for oiled wildlife response preparedness.
During 2017 considerable further progress has been made in the Beta-phase of the GOWRS (Global Oiled Wildlife Response System) project.
The EUROWA project partners met at RSPCA Mallydams Wood in October 2017 for the first in-person meeting since the end of the EU-funded aspect of the project.
The third meeting of experts involved in the Global Oiled Wildlife Response System (GOWRS) project took place last month in Delaware, USA.
The project– a two-year initiative funded by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) as part of the Oil Spill Response Joint Industry Project (OSR-JIP) – aims to design an international system for oiled wildlife response expertise that can be mobilized for assistance in complex oiled wildlife scenarios.
The second in-person meeting of ‘JIP20’, an oil-industry-funded project to develop a system for mobilising international oiled wildlife response resources, was held in Brazil in February. Aiuká, one of the participating organisations, hosted the meeting at their oiled wildlife response facility in Praia Grande, near Santos.
In December 2015, a field exercise at ECOMARE, on the Wadden Sea island of Texel, tested local oiled wildlife response capability and ECOMARE’s ability to function as a stabilisation centre. Sea Alarm and Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend organised the exercise as part of the Dutch national oiled wildlife training and exercise programme.
A week-long meeting held in Brussels in September 2015 marked the beginning of a multi-stakeholder oiled wildlife response project to address the gap between oil spill response preparedness and wildlife response preparedness on a global scale.