20th Ordinary Meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Barcelona Convention

The Executive Secretary of ACCOBAMS, Ms. Florence Descroix-Comanducci, participated to the twentieth ordinary meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and the Coastal Region of the Mediterranean (the Barcelona Convention) and its Protocol, held in Tirana, from 17 to 20 December 2017, and hosted by the Government of Albania.

The Executive Secretary took the floor during the opening statements of the representatives of partner organizations. She recalled that ACCOBAMS had been contributing to the protection of cetaceans for 21 years by mitigating the main threats that they faced, which required a coordinated, regional response based on intergovernmental collaboration. In that context, the ACCOBAMS Permanent Secretariat has been working closely with the Mediterranean Action Plan to develop noise-related indicators within the ecosystem approach process and was looking to strengthen cooperation with MEDPOL through the quietMED project. She recalled the ACCOBAMS Survey Initiative, a macroregional project aimed at establishing an integrated cetacean monitoring system for the entire ACCOBAMS area, which would provide a better understanding of the abundance and distribution of cetaceans and other marine fauna and help to bolster national capacities for data collection and analysis.

She announced that the Mediterranean part of the Survey will be undertaken in June-July 2018.