Improving and updating our Country Oiled Wildlife Response Profiles

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.

The CWRP project began in 2004 as a Sea Alarm initiative supported by BP, aiming to assess the capacity for oiled wildlife response in coastal countries around the world. In 2005 the ambitions of the project became further structured and integrated as part of the wider cooperation with Oil Spill Response (OSRL), to create a useful international information resource to support oiled wildlife preparedness and response around the globe.

The decision was taken to make the CWRPs more widely available by publishing them on the Sea Alarm website and, by doing so, providing quality information on wildlife resources that would complement country information provided by organisations such as ITOPF and REMPEC To date 108 profiles have been created. Profile number 100 was published in 2017.

Starting in 2014, we began updating the older profiles to reflect changes in the situation in individual countries. At that time, we also looked more closely at the data we were providing with an eye to increasing the depth of the profiles. As we move into 2021, we continue to look at ways in which we can further improve the profiles’ usefulness.