NGOs demand action on marine migration corredor

Rare siting of Rorcual whale off Tarifa near Strait of Gibraltar in 2009. Photo: C. Zimmerman / Wikimedia Commons
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• Ecologistas, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife, FOE & WWF press gov’t for action
• Seek to end Mediterranean oil-gas drilling to protect migratory marine species

Spain’s five leading Spanish environmental and wildlife protection NGOs — Friends of the Earth, Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife and WWF — have issued an urgent call to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment and its Coastal and Sea Sustainability agency to move forward with protection of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean by halting oil and gas exploration activities off the Spanish coastline.

In December, Ibiza-based environmental protection NGO Alianza Mar Blava announced the Agriculture ministry had agreed to clear a migration corridor for whales and dolphins along the Valencian and Catalan coastlines, but faced with no action yet to achieve the aim of protecting the marine species the five environmental NGOs have joined together to push for an immediate ban on drilling and exploration activities by international companies in the Balearic Sea and the Gulf of León.

The NGOs are joining Alianza Mar Blava in calling for declaration of the migration corredor as a Specially Protected Areas of Mediterranean Importance (SPAMI), agreed to by Spain at a ministerial-level meeting in Athens in February ratifying the terms of the UN’s 1995 Protocol Concerning Mediterranean Specially Protected Areas and Biological Diversity in the Mediterranean.

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