IUCN Red List:

Minke Whales Moved from “Threatened” to “Lower Risk”

The 1994 list cannot be directly compared to that of 1996 because major changes have been made to the criteria on which the lists are based, and attempts have been made to make them more objective. The Lower Risk category has been defined as follows: “A taxon is Lower Risk when it has been evaluated and does not satisfy the criteria for any of the categories Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable”. The species in the Lower Risk Category are divided into three categories: 1) Conservation Dependent 2) Near Threatened 3) Least Concern. “Near Threatened” is defined as: “Taxa which do not qualify for conservation dependent, but which are close to qualifying as Vulnerable.” Vulnerable is in turn defined as applying to a species “that is facing a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term future”.

“It is difficult to accept that the minke whale should be ‘close to facing a high risk of extinction in the medium-term future’,” says Georg Blichfeldt, secretary of the High North Alliance. “None of the minke whale stocks that have been subject to research qualify for this classification, nor is there any indication that the few stocks that have not been the subject of thorough research do either.” There are about 1 million minke whales worldwide and the species is abundant in all the oceans.