About today’s campaign:

World leaders are gathered at COP29 discussing our planet’s future, and Whale and Dolphin Conservation are there with them. Working in partnership with many amazing organisations, we are providing real solutions and, importantly, hope.

It might feel hopeless sometimes, like nothing changes and you can’t have any impact on your own. But you are not alone. Together we are a powerful, global movement. And we have some enormous allies who will help us, if we just let them – whales.

One Minute Brief of the Day:

Create social media images/posters that celebrate whales as icons of the environmental movement and powerful symbols of our need to restore the ocean.

Our planet needs a healthy ocean, and a healthy ocean needs whales. Today’s entries need to give people hope. #SaveTheWhaleSaveTheWorld @whalesorg are at COP29 right now – help them make sure whales and the ocean are high on the agenda of climate talks.

The winning entry will be simple, positive, thought provoking and impossible to ignore.

Remember to include your Twitter handle in the top left-hand corner of your submissions. Enter as many times as you like. Deadline 6pm GMT.

Tweet your entries to @OneMinuteBriefs and @whalesorg with the hashtags #SaveTheWhaleSaveTheWorld & #COP29

You can also share your entries via stories and posts to Instagram.

PRIZES:

£200 cash & a year’s adoption of a whale.

About WDC:

WDC is the leading global NGO dedicated to protecting whales and dolphins.

We are lean, ambitious, impactful, and internationally respected.

We work across the whole spectrum of conservation threats, from climate breakdown to captivity and hunting. Why? Because whales and dolphins are awesome. They are thinking, feeling, emotional, social beings who are vital for the health of the ocean and therefore our planet.

More info:

Once, the ocean flourished. Coral reefs bloomed, fish populations were plentiful, and whales and dolphins were abundant. But industrial whaling, destructive modern fishing methods, pollution, oil and gas exploration and drilling, and shipping 226 million containers across the seas every year have devastated the ocean environment and whale and dolphin populations. We urgently need to restore nature. We must re-whale the ocean by allowing it to recover and fill once again with life

We need to:

Recognise we are all connected

The ocean covers most of Earth’s surface and it needs an abundance of whales and dolphins and fish and coral and crustaceans and all the other wonderful species to be healthy and functioning. Non-human animals aren’t just cute and ‘nice to have’ or resources only to be eaten and exploited, they are essential for a sustainable planet – our home.

Understand whales are climate giants

The ocean is one of our planet’s lungs. It produces more oxygen and absorbs more carbon than all of Earth’s forests combined, and whales help it to flourish. hales fertilise tiny plants called phytoplankton with their poo and wee and they transport nutrients around the world on their long migrations. Even after they die, their carcasses sustain around 200 species and lock away carbon.

Let the ocean sing again

Stories passed down through generations in Indigenous cultures and coastal communities, from New Zealand to Shetland, Alaska to Cornwall, remember a time when the seas were teeming with whales and dolphins and fish. We need them back in their original numbers. We’ve devastated the ocean and filled it with noise, but before our industrial exploitation of the seas, the ocean was full of whale song.