The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service has received a request from the U.S. Navy (Navy) to extend the time period from December 2023 to December 2025 for Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) regulations authorizing the take of marine mammals incidental to Navy training and testing activities conducted in the Hawaii-Southern California Training and Testing Study Area. NMFS has published Federal Register notice of its intent to grant the Navy’s request. NMFS’ notice reads in part as follows:
On September 4, 2019, Cook Inletkeeper and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit challenging NOAA/NMFS’ issuance of Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) “Take” rules for Hilcorp Alaska LLC’s offshore oil and gas operations in Cook Inlet, Alaska. The complaint alleges violations of the MMPA, NEPA, and the Endangered Species Act. The filed complaint is available here.
An International Association of Oil & Gas Producers website posted the above-titled article, which reads as follows:
“Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Programme (JIP) recently sponsored the ‘Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life 2019 conference’, which took place in Den Haag in The Netherlands.
‘We were pleased to sponsor this conference as its key focus closely matches ours – scientific research into marine animals and potential effects of sound, and several of the JIP funded scientists presented their work,’ says Wendy Brown, IOGP Environment Director. ‘It provided us with the opportunity to promote a number of our recently published scientific research projects.’
