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Verifying Compliance with Ballast Water Discharge Regulations
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ballast water, or approved, environmentally sound alternatives and established a national
mandatory ballast water management program.
5
Although offshore ballast water exchange has functioned as an interim management
approach for reducing the risks posed by aquatic invasive species, it is now broadly accepted
that ballast water exchange does not provide an adequate level of environmental protection,
and that it can be dangerous for vessels and crew.
6
Therefore, both the International Maritime
Organization (IMO), through the adoption of the 2004 International Convention for the
Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediment (hereafter IMO Ballast
Water Convention),
7
and, more recently, the USCG
8
have proposed ballast water discharge
standards that limit concentrations of living organisms that can be released with ballast
water and new regulations that require ship operators to meet those limits.
To address the IMO and U.S. discharge standards, technology developers and manufac-
turers around the world have designed and built a variety of onboard ballast water treatment
systems (BWTSs) to achieve the prescribed discharge limits.
9
There are now several BWTSs
that have been rigorously tested (land based and shipboard) by independent laboratories
and received IMO-type approval certifications from various administrations. These include:
deoxygenation; filtration plus ultraviolet (UV) radiation; and various chemical treatments
such as chlorine, ozone, and peracetic acid.
While scientific research was under way to establish allowable ballast water discharge
standards and technical researchwas under way to find treatment systems capable of meeting
them, policy-related research was undertaken to assess and compare alternative national or
international regulatory and legal frameworks that have been proposed to control ballast
water discharge.
10
Limited economic research has also been undertaken to identify the most
cost-effective ballast water treatment strategies from the perspective of regulated shipping
interests and “optimal” methods for governments to enforce ballast water regulations.
11
In general, the economic models that have focused on cost-effective ballast water en-
forcement have used data about vessel type, ballast capacity, voyage route, the ballast water
source port, season, and exposure and vulnerability of at-risk ecosystems at the discharge
port to identify which vessels pose high ballast water discharge threats.
12
They have not
focused on cost-effective ways to actually carry out the enforcement of ballast water regu-
lations by detecting, verifying, and prosecuting violations. These are essential tasks that are
particularly difficult because, for practical reasons, ballast water regulations cannot place
limits on concentrations of living organisms that exist in ballast water on board ships, only
on ballast water that is discharged from ships. This means that a violation does not occur un-
til it is probably too late to be prevented. It also means that the characteristics of ballast water
taken aboard a vessel or the vessel type or route may be leading indicators of potential vio-
lations before mandatory ballast water treatment. But they may be less important in identi-
fying potential and actual violations than information about the effectiveness of the onboard
BWTS and whether it is in proper operating condition and performing to specifications.
Because the international maritime industry is diffuse and obscure, it is difficult to
regulate effectively. As described above, however, three key factors will determine whether
the IMO Ballast Water Convention and U.S. ballast water regulations will be successful at
reducing environmental and economic risks from harmful aquatic invasive species:
1. the limits the regulations place on allowable concentrations of living organisms in
ballast water discharge;
2. the availability of technologies to meet those limits; and
3. the willingness of ship operators to comply with ballast water regulations by in-
stalling, maintaining, and effectively using those technologies.
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