In November Hugo Nijkamp and Paul Kelway of Sea Alarm, in cooperation with staff from Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, provided several days of training in oiled wildlife response in Trinidad. Local Trinidad press covered this event both in print and online (see links below). Included in the training were response planning and ‘train the trainer’ sessions.
Having just reported that HELCOM Response was recommending stronger oiled wildlife response targets, Sea Alarm is pleased to note that on 3 October, the 2013 Copenhagen Ministerial Meeting of HELCOM, the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, has agreed on those targets.
Sea Alarm been growing over the last few years, both as a presence in the oiled wildlife response world and as an organisation. Learn more about the people who make up the Sea Alarm team.
In anticipation of the decisions by the HELCOM Ministerial Meeting, Sea Alarm has asked Agni Kaldma from Estonia to work on a project to identify the possibility of creating more and closer regional cooperation between leading NGOs in the Baltic countries.
As part of a multi-year contract with Rijkswaterstaat, Sea Alarm designed, prepared and facilitated a two-day exercise event, held in October 2013 in ‘s-Gravezande, the Netherlands, which included three field and two table-top exercises.
In Ireland, Sea Alarm has provided support on oiled wildlife response planning to the Shannon Estuary oil spill response authority .
Our two main websites, the Sea Alarm site and Oiledwildlife.eu have been updated.
Sea Alarm has been asked to assist the States of Guernsey in reviewing and updating their arrangements for oiled wildlife preparedness and response. As part of the process, an oiled wildlife preparedness training event and stakeholder meeting was held in mid-September in conjunction with an Oil Spill Response (OSRL) shoreline cleanup training course.
Following Hugo Nijkamp’s presentation of a joint Sea Alarm and WWF-Finland paper, HELCOM Response has recommended strengthening targets for integrating wildlife response into Baltic area oil spill response planning.
A recently signed MoU between Sea Alarm and the University of Guelph aims to join forces in improving international appreciation of marine wildlife emergency response and preparedness.
The week before the first POSOW ‘Train the trainer’ session (see related article), Claude Velter gave an invited presentation on the work of Sea Alarm at AdriaSpillcon in Opatija, Croatia. He also spoke about the POSOW training programme.
In May, Sea Alarm’s Claude Velter and Saskia Sessions delivered ‘Train the Trainer” courses, in association with Centre Vétérinaire de la Faune Sauvage et des Ecosystèmes (CVFSE) and WWF Finland.