Sea Alarm had several opportunities in 2011 to meet face to face with oil industry members of Oil Spill Response () at its shareholder meetings in June and December. Sea Alarm had a small exhibition stand at both of OSRL”s Shareholder meetings, which took place in San Francisco in June and in Southampton in December.
Sea Alarm has made important steps in 2011 towards developing better preparedness for Arctic oiled wildlife incidents. Saskia Sessions was invited to make a presentation at the October meeting of the Arctic Council’s Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response Working Group (EPPR).
ITOPF is one of Sea Alarm’s key partners and the two organisations have been cooperating for over a decade now, both when responding to oil spills and also in some wildlife preparedness activities. A presentation day was held at ITOPF’s offices in London in October, to strengthen this relationship and bring some of ITOPF’s newer staff up to speed with Sea Alarm’s work.
Hugo Nijkamp and Saskia Sessions travelled to the RSPCA’s Headquarters in West Sussex, UK for a meeting in November last year.
Sea Alarm achieved two firsts last year: attending a regional conference of the Global Initiative for West and Central Africa (GI WACAF) and teaming up with SANCCOB to make a joint presentation on oiled wildlife preparedness and response at this event.
Sea Alarm has seen a growing recognition in 2011 by the oil industry of the need to take oiled wildlife response seriously and to devote it the same attention as traditional oil spill response.
Sea Alarm has prepared guidelines for Black Sea Countries on oiled wildlife impact assessment. These guidelines were provided at the request of the Black Sea Commission Permanent Secretariat in the framework of the EU-funded MONINFO project.