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This week's meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has seen the adoption of a major climate change resolution and highlighted current threats to whales, while member nations have come head-to-head regarding their future protection.

The 61st annual meeting of the IWC has seen 85 member countries come together in Madeira, Portgual, who unanimously decided yesterday that climate change is a key threat to the world's whales.

They have set forward a resolution urging governments to commit to reducing emissions at the UN Climate meeting in Copenhagen at the end of the year in order to address this issue.

"This is a very positive development that will help ensure that climate negotiations take into account impacts on biodiversity," said Rob Nicoll, Antarctic and Southern Ocean Initiatives Manager for WWF-Australia.

"However, members did not take action that would stop commercial whaling outside of IWC regulation, which is a fundamental problem that the IWC must address, and which continues today."

This discussion of the IWC's whaling regulations was foremost on the meeting's agenda, with pro and anti-whaling blocs both pushing for changes.

Many governments, including Australia's, were demanding closure of loopholes in the IWC's founding treaty that allow, for example, "scientific" whaling for research purposes (as used by Japan), or whaling under "objection to management decisions" (as used by Norway).

Despite the global moratorium on commercial whaling introduced in 1986, together the two countries have used these loopholes to kill up to 2,000 whales annually.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government has been pushing for a whaling quota to be introduced that would allow whales to be caught, quasi-commercially, in its own coastal waters, causing much controversy.

Debate on this issue has been ongoing, said IWC head William Hogarth.

"I don't think that people are willing to wait more than one year [for a solution]...If we don't have answers by 2010, I think a lot of countries will be looking for another way to solve this," he said.

The meeting has also heard that Greenland plans to up its subsistence whaling quotas for humpbacks, while in recent months Iceland has substantially raised its own quotas for hunting minke whales and endangered fin whales.

"If we thought we'd save the whale, we were wrong," said Darren Kindleysides, director of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, in response to the failing efforts of the IWC treaty to stop commercial whaling.

"Incredibly almost 30,000 of the planet's whales have been killed since the ban of whaling. In recent years, Japan has doubled the number of whales killed under the thin disguise of scientific research in the Southern Ocean. Furthermore, the last year has seen more whale meat traded internationally than in the entire decade before."

The moratorium on whaling must be upheld and strengthened, he said, in order to advance whale conservation.

Several reports on the conservation status of whales, dolphins and porpoises (all 'cetaceans') had also been released to coincide with the IWC meeting, including the Global Cetacean Summary Report, released last week by Australia's Environment Minister, Peter Garrett.

The report reveals that while a few species and populations have started to recover from the effects of commercial whaling, many cetaceans - especially river and coastal dolphins and porpoises - face increasing human-induced threats, including climate change, but also related to habitat degradation, pollution, overfishing of prey species and fishery-related incidents.

These threats, if allowed to continue unabated, are likely to overwhelm some species and populations, and possibly drive some to extinction in the near future, the report said.

"So far, out of the [world's] 86 cetacean species...16 per cent are listed as threatened, in the vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered categories," said Peter Harrison, Director of the Whale Research Centre at Southern Cross University, who was involved in the research.

And we have only been able to determine the conservation status of just over half of all species, due to lack of information, he said, "which means we don't...know whether or not they're safe and secure, or whether in fact some of those species are also threatened."

"Many of the species that are currently recognised as threatened have been impacted in previous centuries by over-exploitation through commercial whaling, and that remains a key cause of concern if whaling was to resume and have substantial catch rates again," he said.

Also coinciding with the week's meeting was the release of the first analysis of the economics of commercial whaling , conducted by independent economists, which found the industry to be largely unprofitable - particularly considering the blows to public image and the risks of trade and tourism boycotts.

Despite this, however, it was revealed that the governments of Norway and Japan are using tax payer money to provide subsidies to whalers. Norway, for example, has spent close to $6 million since 1992 on public information and lobbying campaigns to garner support for it's whaling.

"In this time of global economic crisis, the use of valuable tax dollars to prop up what is basically an economically unviable industry, is neither strategic, sustainable, nor an appropriate use of limited government funds," said WWF's Nicoll.

There is more value in protecting our sea creatures than killing them, he said. For example the value of whales, dolphins and porpoises is reflected in the increasing popularity of whale and dolphin watching ecotourism ventures.

This is one of the world's fastest growing tourism sectors, and, over the next 20 years, is estimated to be worth up to US$2.6 billion annually in high-income countries.