RAWALPINDI, Jan 5: As the Indus River Dolphin’s population in Pakistan is under severe threat due to polluted water, poaching, fragmentation of habitat due to barrages and dolphin stranding, the UN environment agency has declared 2007, ‘Year of the Dolphin’ in an attempt to save one of the world’s most endangered mammal.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has listed industrial, agricultural and human pollution, as well as the use of dams and barrages, which restrict the dolphin’s movement as some of the major threats facing the aquatic mammal.

Accidental catches by fishermen in the irrigation canals are also contributing to the decline of dolphin population, the global conservation organisation warns.

The IUCN has already included the Indus Dolphin in its Red List of mammals.

Latest evidence shows that the Indus River Dolphin is the second most endangered dolphin species after the Yangtze River in China’s largest river.

The survey led by WWF-Pakistan and Sindh and Punjab Wildlife departments revealed that there are fewer than 1,100 Indus River dolphins along the 1,300km stretch of the Indus river system that are divided into five populations due to the presence of six barrages on the Indus River.

River dolphins swim in some of the world’s most densely populated river basins, including the Ganges and Indus river basins, where one tenth of the world’s people live.

WWF - Pakistan is working with authorities and local people along the Indus River to improve water quality and dolphin habitat through the Indus River Dolphin Conservation Project, local communities are being encouraged not to pollute the river with household detergents and to prevent toxic run-off by using natural fertilisers, such as cow manure.

Further, it is working with the local communities and Sindh Wildlife Department to rescue stranded dolphins from the irrigation canals.

The campaign has been launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in line with the UN Convention on Migratory Species and it will involve governments, NGOs, and the private sector around the world to emphasise the need to protect dolphin species.

The United Nations, governments, inter-governmental organisations, NGOs and the private sector need to build a strong alliance to achieve the common objective to protect dolphins.

A crucial factor in achieving this is education to create awareness of dolphin species, educate, inform decision-makers and involve local communities. Therefore, the Year of the Dolphin will be part of the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development. The campaign is also a tangible contribution towards meeting targets to reduce the loss of wildlife by 2010 which all governments have agreed through the UN.

WWF describes river dolphins as ‘watchdogs’ of the water, but they face entanglement in fishing nets, marine pollution, prey depletion due to over-fishing, deliberate hunting and disturbance from noise. These are only some of the causes why they might soon be extinct in the world’s seas, alarms WWF.

The wildlife authorities in Sindh and Punjab have been monitoring different components of the surviving Indus River Dolphin population for decades but the survey programmes have suffered from a lack of financial support, technical capacity, and continuity of effort.

To raise general awareness and public interest in the conservation of cetacean (whales, dolphins, porpoises etc.) in Pakistan, and to promote the study and conservation of cetaceans in the country, WWF-Pakistan has announced the initiation of the ‘Pakistan Whale and Dolphin Group’ (PWDG) under the Darwin Initiative Project on the Conservation of Pakistan’s Marine Cetacean Biodiversity and Pelagic Environment.

In their latest survey on the continental shelf 120 kilometres offshore ‘on 2,000 metre deep waters’ the team saw hundreds of spinner dolphins, both alone and in groups or ‘pods’, arriving from at least two kilometres away. These dolphins are famous for their aerial display as they leap out of the water and spin before diving back in.

In the scientific survey close to the shore, the CCP team has also surveyed a porpoise and two other dolphin species. This work is the first of its kind in Pakistan.