Peter Bridgewater has a clear message for the International Whaling Commission (IWC) he once led. The organization—which played a crucial role in ending whaling in the 1980s—has become a zombie institution that is expected to vote to dissolve itself at next month’s meeting.

“The commission did a great job, but that was in the last century,” Bridgewater told the Observer last week. “Today, like so many other international conventions or organizations, it has outlived its useful life and should be quietly dissolved.”

This point was emphasized by Bridgewater – who was president of the IWC from 1994 to 1997 – in a commentary article published in Nature last week and was written with several other conservationists, including Rakhyun Kim of the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development at Utrecht University and Robert Blasiak of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

“The IWC will hold its 69th session in Lima in September,” they state in their article. “We propose that it transfer some outstanding issues to other conventions and national governments and then close down.”

It is an extraordinarily robust demand. Nevertheless, the group argues that such a move is urgently needed – to set an example for the future of the thousands of other international environmental organizations that exist today.

Many of these agencies have had little collective impact, but spend millions of dollars a year on secretariats and meetings and consume government time and resources, Bridgewater and his colleagues say. Examples include the Montreal Protocol, which monitors ozone depletion. The remaining tasks could easily be handled by other UN agencies, they say.

“Proud legacies and historical achievements are important, but it is in no one’s interest to let institutions become zombies,” Bridgewater and colleagues say.

The International Whaling Commission was originally established “to provide for the proper development of whale stocks and thus to enable the orderly development of the whaling industry”. However, as environmental concerns grew and the numbers of large whales – including the gray whale, humpback whale, sei whale, sperm whale, bowhead whale and minke whale – plummeted as their slaughter, in their tens of thousands each year, continued, the Commission decided in 1982 that all commercial whaling should cease in the 1985-6 season.

Those achievements are commendable, but they are 40 years in the past, the group says. “IWC meetings have since been a source of bitter and fruitless dialogues among member states. By leaving with dignity, the IWC would set a powerful example for the international environmental community.”

Studies of whale populations show that almost all species are now increasing. Humpback whales have increased greatly in numbers, as have blue and minke whales. The main exception is the North Atlantic right whale, which has suffered greatly from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

The rest of the world’s whales, however, are doing well, Bridgewater said. “Since the moratorium, the numbers of the species have increased to varying degrees. And that’s the point of our message to the IWC: ‘You did your job. It was really good work. You got results. Now it’s time to hang up the bag and go with dignity.’”

Only three countries currently engage in whaling: Norway, Iceland and Japan. “These are small numbers of catches,” Bridgewater added. “Crucially, the IWC has had no impact whatsoever on stopping whaling by these countries.”

Instead, the commission’s work could easily be handled by the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), it argues. As the group points out, whaling is not the biggest threat to whales today. “It’s ship strikes, pollution and climate change.”

In response to the article in NatureAn IWC spokesperson last week defended the commission, pointing out that since its inception the commission had developed into an organisation dealing with a range of important issues in the science, conservation and management of cetaceans.

“These include, but are not limited to, entanglement and bycatch in fishing gear (which is the greatest threat, estimated to cost the lives of over 300,000 cetaceans each year), ship strikes, strandings, marine litter and, of course, the IWC Scientific Committee’s world-leading and comprehensive programme of assessments of whale populations around the world.”