ATLANTIC WHALE DEAL Project: Mitigating Ship Strikes and Enhancing Carbon Sequestration in the Atlantic

Abstract

The Atlantic Ocean faces multiple pressures, resulting in biodiversity loss and associated loss of carbon sequestration. As ecosystem engineers, cetaceans play a crucial role in preserving and regulating ocean conditions. They provide essential ecosystem services, contributing to element and nutrient cycles by enhancing phytoplankton nutrition, as well as supporting cultural activities such as whale watching. Whales occur across coastal and open sea areas and despite their major environmental role, are greatly affected by human-induced hazards such as ship strikes. Increasing shipping activity leads to a higher risk of whale-ship collisions, posing dangers to both the animals and the vessels involved. The ATLANTIC WHALE DEAL is a 36-month project started on December 2023 and co-funded by the EU Interreg Atlantic Area for a total of 3.5M€, that will test innovative technologies to mitigate ship strikes and prevent biodiversity loss while putting forward transnational cooperation between multiple stakeholders. The project will work to produce (acoustic, visual, and thermal) detection and localization techniques, create maps of collision risk and acoustic contamination integrated into interactive tools, as well as evaluating the ecosystem services provided by whales, and inform a long-term sustainable plan. Physicists, engineers, biologists, statisticians, designers, and socio-economists from four countries of the Atlantic Area (Portugal, France, Spain, and Ireland) will join efforts towards effective solutions to benefit society through governmental, non-governmental, academic, and commercial bodies. By safeguarding whale populations, the project aims to enhance the ecosystem services provided by these iconic creatures, strengthen natural solutions to carbon sequestration, and improve the health and long-term use of resources in the Atlantic, thus benefiting society towards global sustainability.