Words by Whale Seeker

Whale Seeker, a Montreal-based startup that leverages AI to simplify whale monitoring, is leading a new project the Canadian Arctic, to develop and test a scalable whale carbon and biodiversity detection methodology and credit system. The Whale Carbon Plus project will incentivise marine actors to monitor marine mammal presence and take meaningful action to avoid conflict with them.

To date, blue carbon has focused on sedentary, largely coastal ecosystems such as coral, seagrass, kelp, and mangroves. Beyond coastal flora, science has discovered that whales also play a key ecological role in the ocean’s capability to sequester massive amounts of carbon thus helping to mitigate climate change. Yet no carbon or biodiversity system has been developed to value and bring to market an offset for the contribution of whales to carbon sequestration in the open ocean. Scientists now recognize that without biodiversity – both in the ocean and on land – ecosystems lose their resilience and capacity to draw down carbon from the atmosphere at the rates needed to stay within the 1.5° C warming. Thus, whales are key allies in the fight against climate change.

It is urgent a market-ready whale credit system is created, along with the necessary policy, to incentivize global whale monitoring and conservation. Determining the value of whale ecosystem services and creating a market solution requires whale and ocean data, scientific research, monitoring technology, and collaboration across ocean stakeholders.

Whale Seeker’s unique contribution is to advance visual remote sensing technology combined with ethical AI, that can monitor whale presence to prevent harm from industries sharing the whales’ ocean habitat. This technology brings accountability and verifiability to industry operating practices and standards.

Whale Seeker™ is leading this project in the Canadian Arctic, to develop and test a scalable whale carbon and biodiversity detection methodology and credit system to incentivize all marine actors to monitor marine mammal presence and take meaningful action to avoid conflict with them. By basing our methodology on images, we are both providing an auditable quantitative measure of marine mammals and firm metrics to aid in ESG reporting. The pilot project will focus on narwhals (Monodon monoceros), using existing science data collected over 10 years to model and verify whale services, while also bringing in new and existing aerial imagery and satellite technology to measure whale abundance in relation to ocean productivity and health. With these advances in science and technology, along with other test cases around the globe to address other whale threats such as entanglements, we aim to deliver verified carbon/biodiversity credits to marine industries in the next two years.

“Our current economic paradigm values dead whales that are sold for their meat. In contrast, living whales are valued at zero dollars although their ecological services, including carbon sequestration, are incredibly valuable to our own survival and well-being as well as to the health of our ocean. We need a new economic paradigm that recognizes and values the services of a living and thriving nature, both flora and fauna. This new nature-positive economy will lead to sustainable and shared prosperity for all,” says Ralph Chami, Assistant Director at the IMF.

“Increasing the world’s whale populations is a win-win strategy to capture more carbon from the atmosphere and improve ocean health. However, for whale protection measures to be adopted on a global scale, we need to incentivize businesses and other stakeholders by proving the benefits of protecting whales far exceed the cost. By using ethical AI we aim to set not only a high technical standard for whale detection, but also an ethical one.”, adds Emily Charry-Tissier, CEO and Co-Founder of Whale Seeker.

“For centuries people have used the latest technologies to hunt down and kill whales,” says Ed Goodall, from project board member WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “It is a measure of just how far we have come from those dark days that we are now using the latest technology to hunt down and save them. Whales play an outsized role in the marine ecosystem and carbon capture, but these ‘services’ have not fully recognised or valued before. We are now in a race against time to build the evidence base, and secure the finance, needed to help whale populations recover, and we are delighted to be working with Whale Seeker on this exciting, cutting-edge project.”

This project will create replicable and scalable methodologies and market solutions for ocean conservation and marine mammal health globally. The status of the world’s whale populations is a clear indicator of ocean health and a powerful pathway to mitigate climate change.

Learn more about the Whale Carbon Plus Project.

The views and opinions expressed by guest contributors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Ocean Oculus.