Regulating international maritime shipping’s air polluting emissions monitoring, reporting, verifying and enforcing regulatory compliance

Abstract

Empirical studies have established that ships in international commerce emit air pollutants with damaging effects on human health, climate change and food production. Effective regulation of these emissions depends on technologies, policies and administrative processes that monitor, report, verify and enforce compliance with the regulations (MRV&E systems). The article addresses the following questions: What are the provisions for MRV&E? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the systems? What can be done to make MRV&E systems more effective? The article concludes that current MRV&E policies are defective in some respects, especially concerning enforcement. Nevertheless, there are elements of current MRV&E systems that can provide building blocks for more effective regulatory systems. The conclusions are basedon a data set developed from annual reports of Port State Control (PSC) authorities for the three years 2017–2019. The results of more than 80,000 inspections each year in all regions of the world were reported, and the inspections were done on ships of all flag countries. There was also a one-time, Concentrated Inspection Campaign (CIC) in 2018 that focused on compliance with emissions and fuel efficiency regulations. The CIC involved 12,703 inspections in ports of 63 countries, which used a standardized list of inspection questions.