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What is the Carbon Footprint of Whaling?

Posted on 26. Feb, 2010 by Ross in Climate Change

The last century of whaling has released as much carbon dioxide into the air as 128,000 Humvees driving continuously for 100 years: and that’s without taking emissions from the whaling fleet into account.

One of the flagship issues of the environmental movement in the 20th century, whaling has long been condemned not just by green groups but most of the world’s governments as an unnecessary and cruel slaughter of one of the world’s most sentient lifeforms. Whaling nations such as Japan and Norway, as well as many small island nations, have long fought to protect what they see as a historic and traditional right to hunt whales for food.

One aspect of the ongoing fight between the anti-whaling nations and the whalers which has received little attention, however, is the carbon footprint of whaling. Like a red rag to a bull, though, some recent research has given even more cause for environmentalists to rally to the aid of cetaceans.

According to research from the University of Maine, the carbon footprint of whaling has been equivalent to removing 130,000 square kilometres of forests, or continuously driving 128,000 Humvees for the whole century.

The analysis is based on the fact that when whales die, their bodies sink to the ocean floor and their organic tissue is subsumed by the deep-ocean ecosystems, locking their carbon mass far away from the atmosphere. By contrast, commercial whaling ensures that the whales are brought into ecosystems more likely to convert the whales’ carbon content into atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Indeed, given that commercial whaling is also driven by the harvesting of whale oil, part of the whalers’ catch is burnt straight into the atmosphere.

The larger an animal is, the more efficient it is as a carbon store, meaning that whales are the most effective individual stores of carbon in the animal kingdom. In the same way that carbon credits are available for nations’ protection of forests, environmentalists will see the research as grounds for setting up similar carbon credits for the protection of whales.

On top of the direct carbon footprint of whale bodies, whaling also requires boat fuel for the whaling fleets. This was the basis of a previous conservative estimate of the carbon footprint of whaling released by a Norwegian pro-whaling lobby two years ago, which claimed that the carbon footprint of beef was eight times that of whale meat.

The difference comes from the agricultural infrastructure associated with livestock farming, as well as the methane that the bacteria in the cows’ digestive systems produce. The carbon footprint of the processes involved in hunting whale meat - producing 1.9kg of carbon dioxide per kg of whale meat - was also found to trump pork and lamb as well, although it was shown to be equivalent to conventional fishing.

The counter-argument at the time from Greenpeace was that all forms of meat were more carbon-intensive than vegetarian diets. However, this latest research has evened up the stakes somewhat, countering the pro-whaling greenwash of a low carbon footprint for whaling without isolating the general meat-eating population of the world.

Image of a whale fluke by t3rmin4t0r @ Flickr

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Tags: carbon footprint, whaling