(University of Oregon School of Law, 2022-05-03) Borges, Julio C. M.
As transportation of cargo by ships constitutes ninety-five percent of all international trade, several negative externalities on marine pollution from those activities remain only poorly addressed. One of the most critical challenges of marine pollution has been the problem posed by marine invasive species transported by ships’ ballast water. To tackle this issue, the International Maritime Organization approved an international convention called the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments, which entered into force globally on September 9, 2017, and offers technical guidance to vessels on exchanges or performance standards for ballast water treatment. Besides scientific debates on the technical justifications for those solutions, a major difficulty is the actual enforcement of the IMO Convention rules, mostly based on formal checks on paper registries by coastal authorities, keeping the issue of ballast water management largely unsolved.
