Hitchhiking organisms

Mandatory regulations are on their way to combat the problem of the transportation of marine organisms in ships’ ballast water.

For the past ten years the IMO, via its Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), has been working towards a mandatory regulatory framework to resolve the problem of the migration of foreign marine via ships’ ballast water.

The problem has been getting a lot of press recently and it is being blamed for tropical species turning up in the increasingly warm waters of the Mediterranean, three recent invaders introduced to the Great Lakes in North America, and the identification by Australian scientists of over 200 foreign marine species in Australian coastal waters, most of which they say have been introduced via shipping.

There is urgent need for agreement and there is a risk that individual states, impatient with the progress being made at IMO, will take unilateral action to introduce mandatory ballast water management requirements.

“Much to the disgust of the international shipping industry, individual states are developing their own legislation,” says Tim Wilkins, deputy manager of the environmental section of Intertanko, “California has its own ballast water bill. This is making it very complicated for the ship industry to work out what a ship has to do or what systems have to be on board for a particular state.”

However, agreement at the IMO is still some way off and Intertanko is fighting to avoid the situation where a patchwork of different legislations are set up across the globe. The regulations should be finished in the next two to three years but progress has been slowed owing to the issue of the ban on TBT, says Mr Wilkins. “It has taken the IMO ten years to get this far, and it has been put back slightly because of the banning of TBT,” he says. “There were a few delegations there that wanted to see the banning of TBT on hulls sorted out first and wanted that issue to be promoted over the ballast water issue on the agenda.”

Mr Wilkins says that progress at the Marine Environment Protection Committee is also being slowed by the attention being given to the fine detail of the agreement, but is confident that the final product will be the better for it. “It is to avoid it being a useless instrument that nobody is going to ratify. We want an instrument that can be adopted by all nations.”