The Seminar "Prevention and action in the presence of oil spills: Conservation of Cetaceans and their environment" took place on May 12th and 13th, in the Auditorium of the Subsecretaría de Turismo de Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz. It was organized by Fundación Cethus and the Subsecretaría de Medioambiente de Santa Cruz, and aimed to provide relevant information and analysis of case studies, while propitiating a space for exchanging information and experiences, between various sectors related with this topic. The audience exceeded all expectations, attending about 65 people, all representing various institutions, about 20, directly or indirectly related to the oil industry, research and conservation of marine and coastal environments (oil companies, government agencies, academics and NGOs). Within the context of the Seminar, the official presentation of the website "Mar Limpio” (“Clean Sea") was made (www.cethus.org /mar_limpio), created within Fundación Cethus’ home page (www.cethus.org), both actions as part of the project Conservation of Cetaceans and coastal environments of Latin American. "Contributions to the prevention and action in the presence of oil spills" subsidized by IFAW.

Mar Limpio (“Clean Sea”)
Mar Limpio is a tool that attempts to contribute to the improvement of the capacity for prevention and mitigation of potential oil spills, increasing the accessibility of information and the conservation of cetaceans and coastal environments. Its particular aim is that government and private agencies have an accessible space of information and reference on prevention and mitigation of oil spills and conservation of marine and coastal environments.

Mar Limpio also pretends to provide access and contacts with the large number of organizations that are working towards marine conservation, specially those related to oil activity. All of them generate valuable information and important actions for conservation.

In this regard Mar Limpio invites all institutions linked to this subject to take this tool to disseminate their work and projects, which would enrich this space promoting the exchange and coordination of regional strategies and actions of prevention and conservation.
With the conviction that the Argentine Sea should be considered as a complex ecosystem that requires an integrated management under the precautionary principle, we believe that increasing the prevention on the oil activity, we will increase the conservation of marine and coastal environments. It is essential to maintain the ecological processes that directly or indirectly help to produce valuable goods and services, increasing the investment on prevention, direct investment on conservation and on local and regional sustainable development, especially on renewable natural resources.
The coastal and marine ecosystems help to produce valuable goods and services for people. That is why a crucial task is to identify those goods and services to determine their current and potential benefits for the society, and also the environmental liabilities resulting from the impacts by the use of its resources, damaging the maintenance of ecosystems, that results in liabilities for the whole society. This approach allows us to generate economic-environmental-social criteria supporting decision makers in generating policies for the sustainable use and management of natural resources. These criteria are based on ethical, cultural, socioeconomic, ecological, institutional, political and technical-productive principles.

It is essential to favor a population’s quality of life more related with its cultural diversity, its diversity of natural resources and their historical traditions, making a sustainable use, not only in terms of market, but also depending on the satisfaction of direct needs of that population.

Cristián de Haro
Vicepresident
Fundación Cethus
cristian.deharo@cethus.org