Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Agreements negotiated in this manner address the major environmental issues pertain-
ing to shipping. These include agreements to prevent tankers from discharging oil from
ballast water into the ocean, those to prevent or reduce the severity of oil spills, address
pollution from hazardous substances, and reduce the environmental harm from chemi-
cals used on the outsides of ships. New e
orts address the movement of species from one
ecosystem to another in ballast water. Other major ocean pollution agreements, such as
the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other
Matter, were not negotiated by the IMO but have been brought under its auspices.
Apart from the environmental regulations it oversees, the IMO is the primary organi-
zation addressing the safety of ships, in ways that have direct or indirect implications for
their environmental e
ff
ects. IMO conventions address such issues as safety equipment
and training standards, and the organization runs the regularly updated International
Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS).
The IMO regulatory process faces several hurdles in e
ff
ff
ectively raising environmental
standards on ships. The
rst is the international regulatory context, in which states do not
have to join international agreements and
fi
ags of convenience may choose to lure ship
registrations by keeping low the standards they require of ships. The second is that, even
when ships and states are bound by international rules, enforcing these rules can be
di
fl
cult. While enforcement is always a potential problem in international law, regulation
of ocean ships poses increasing enforcement di
culties of two types.
rst is the number of actors regulated: a rule that applies to behavior on ships must
be implemented by thousands of ships on hundreds of voyages each. The potential for
non-compliance by some subset of regulated actors is much greater than with a rule
implemented at state level. The more actors whose behavior has to change to implement
a rule, the harder it is to ensure that they are all doing so. Ronald Mitchell's work on the
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL 73/78)
and its precursor agreements demonstrate that discharge standards, in which individual
ships on each voyage had to regulate how much oil they discharged into the water from
their ballast tanks, were regularly breached. Later regulations that required segregated
ballast tanks, so that ballast water is carried in a tank separate from that used to carry oil,
have made an enormous di
The
fi
erence in the extent of oil washed out from ballast water. This
change came about not only because those who use segregated ballast tanks comply
with the rules by default, but also because the point of regulation - ship builders - meant
that a smaller number of actors had to change behavior for the regulation to succeed
(Mitchell, 1994).
The second, related, issue is that these regulated ships are, for the most part, traversing
a large, empty space that is outside international jurisdiction. If they are behaving in ways
contrary to the rules they are subject to, this can be extremely di
ff
cult to detect. When an
oil slick is detected in the water, indicating that a ship has broken the rule in question, it
can be nearly impossible to trace that slick to a particular ship. The issue of
sheries pro-
vides numerous examples of individual ships breaking rules they are bound by and avoid-
ing detection.
The IMO has thus created a context of global environmental standards for ships, but
even for those that have agreed to adopt these rules it can be di
fi
cult to ascertain whether
they are actually applying them. And even more problematic are those states or ships that
refuse to adopt them in the
fi
rst place.
