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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:29 am
Time: 12:29 am
Results for toxic pollutants
1 results foundAuthor: International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) Title: Chronic Oil Pollution in Europe Summary: This report reviews recent trends in oil pollution, with emphasis on 'chronic oil pollution' in European waters. Chronic oil pollution is the result of the continuous stream of smaller and larger oil spills and deliberate / illegal "operational" discharges of oily waste from vessels. This pollution is chronic vs. episodic in that recurring oil discharges in a sensitive area prevent the impacted resources from recovering. It is a diffuse type of contamination from various sources that enters the environment in gaseous, liquid or solid forms. The most lethal form enters the marine environment through deliberate (illegal) discharges at sea. The most visible effect of marine oil pollution is the associated mortality of marine wildlife, notably seabirds. This report describes the scale and identifies the sources of the oil pollution problem. It discusses the methods of assessing the impact on marine wildlife and outlines the species-specific and area-specific differences in sensitivity to oiling. Chronic oiling is a constant threat to seabirds. Legal measures to reduce the oil problem are reviewed and considered in the context of recent trends indicating a decline in the proportion of stranded seabirds showing traces of oil contamination. Rather than simply signalling the issue of chronic oil pollution, the concluding comments of the report propose possible solutions and review ideas to further reduce the problem. Chronic oil pollution as an issue - Worldwide annual releases of oil have declined since the early 1970s from approx. 6 million tons to about one million tons, but a general lack of information prevents a thorough evaluation of true current levels of oil pollution at sea. - Illegal and incidental operational discharges from shipping and offshore installations (chronic oil pollution) are the most important sources of marine wildlife casualties because they occur all the time and because of the important overlap between large seabird concentrations and busy shipping lanes. - It is a misconception that large spills cause greater environmental damage than small spills: what matters are when and where the release happens and the type of oil that is spilled. - Seabirds are particularly vulnerable to oil because this substance damages the insulating properties of their plumage, which they require to survive in a maritime environment. -Seabirds that spend most of their time afloat and that have little contact with the coast are the most vulnerable to oil pollution. - Small amounts of oil in the plumage cause a bird to give up feeding and most casualties are due to starvation. - Large amounts of oil on the plumage cause instant immobility and possibly immediate death through suffocation and drowning. Measuring the scale and impact of chronic oil pollution - Beached-bird surveys have been routinely conducted in many European countries over the past decades, enabling a proper historical evaluation of temporal trends in marine oil pollution. - Oil rates in seabirds found dead on beaches are highest in areas bordering shipping lanes. - Significant declines in oil rates have been found over the past 30 years. - Aerial surveys are an instrument to measure oil pollution more directly and the results confirm that most oil slicks are formed in the vicinity of the major shipping lanes. These surveys have generally confirmed the declining trend of oil slick occurrence, but long-term comparable data are not readily available for analysis. - Recent technology offers the possibility to detect oil slicks from space. This technology is particularly promising for the future, but long-term trends cannot be deduced from these data at the moment. - Despite good intentions and collaboration from different countries, an international overview of oil pollution is impeded by difficulties in harmonising the available data. Recent initiatives by the EC Joint Research Centre to develop standard nomenclature and an on-line database are described. - OSPAR introduced a series of Ecological Quality Objectives to monitor characteristic parameters in the marine environment. EcoQOs are intended to act as monitoring guidelines until a set target has been reached. - The oiled-guillemot EcoQO, soon to be implemented, is intended as an instrument for monitoring chronic oil pollution in 15 European sub-regions. The objective of this particular EcoQO is defined as follows: "The average proportion of oiled common guillemots should be 10% or less of the total found dead or dying in each of 15 areas of the North Sea over a period of at least 5 years. Sampling should occur in all winter months (November to April) of each year." We would expect that this will motivate the development and implementation of similar monitoring tools (and policy targets) in other parts of Europe. Chronic oil pollution in Europe - The sources of chronic oil pollution are diverse and estimates of total quantities vary widely. - Two aspects deserve attention: oil pollution has declined over the past decades, but illegal discharges by vessels are still a major source of the chronic oil pollution currently observed. - The EC JRC oil spill database, presented on the web at http://serac.jrc.it/midiv/, is consulted to evaluate recent developments in chronic oil pollution. Composite maps of the Special Areas within Europe (the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the North Sea) show the locations of nearly 20,000 oil slicks detected over a period of six years (only three years in some areas). - The recent data from high tech remote sensing equipment provide a very clear signal that European waters are by no means free of oil spills. Sensitive species, sensitive areas - Oil Vulnerability Indices (OVI) are widely used to rank species in terms of vulnerability to oil. Important parameters are behaviour, exposure, biogeographical population, reproductive potential, and reliance on the marine environment. OVIs should preferably be calculated at the subspecies level. - OVIs have not been calculated for numerous European taxa of seabirds. in the (wintering) distribution of seabirds should be taken into consideration with regard to the vulnerability of certain areas, and a deeper understanding of offshore habitat requirements is therefore needed. • The Greenland Sea, Icelandic waters, Bay of Biscay, Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic coasts, Macaronesia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea are data-deficient in terms of knowledge regarding their sensitivity to oil pollution. - Knowledge pertaining to the sensitivity of the Barents Sea, Norwegian Sea, Channel and Celtic Sea is partly data-deficient. - The North Sea, Irish Sea, waters west of Britain, Faeroese waters and the Baltic Sea are well studied and their sensitivity to oil pollution has been evaluated. The effects of chronic oil pollution on seabird populations - The effects of oil spills on seabirds have often been exaggerated in the past. - Adequate surveys, coupled with drift experiments and accurate information on the age structure of oil spill casualties and their possible (breeding) origin are required to enable a proper evaluation of the scale and impact of accidental or chronic oil pollution on seabirds. - Oil pollution is a major threat to seabirds mainly in their European wintering areas. - Direct effects on seabird populations, such as on survival rates and age structure, are rarely detected because specific long-term studies involving individually marked birds need to be in place in the area affected by the spill before it actually happens. - A recent review of major oil spills revealed that adequate data usually have been collected but those post-spill evaluations making use of that data tend to be rare. - Recent studies showed that winter mortality of adult guillemots was doubled by major oil pollution incidents, demonstrating that oil pollution can have wide-scale impacts on marine ecosystems, and that these impacts can be quantified using populations of marked individual seabirds. Law and programs to reduce levels of oil pollution, and minimising the effects of spills - The UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has recognised pollution from vessels as one of the main threats to the marine environment. In response, UNCLOS has established the framework for the multi-lateral development of rules and standards acting mainly through the competent international organization, namely the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The IMO has adopted several instruments to control the environmental impact of shipping, the most important being the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL 73/78). - Within Europe, "Special Areas" have been identified under MARPOL (Annex I) as waters where oil discharges are essentially illegal. Special Area status within Europe was applied to the Mediterranean, Black, and Baltic seas in 1978. The marine region corresponding to North West European waters (mainly the North Sea) was designated as a Special Area in 1999. - The designation of Special Areas under MARPOL is a significant step, but without enforcement, such legislation is pointless. highlighted above. - Several recent studies based on evidence from offshore surveillance by "coastal" states and from inspections by Port States show that one of the basic problems lies with a relatively small percentage of vessels and owners that persist in consistently operating their vessels in full contravention to the IMO's body of environmental regulations. In relative terms, the numbers are small – approximately 10-15% of the world fleet. However, in absolute terms, this subset of owners accounts for a large number of vessels. - Oily waste discharge standards have been circumvented by companies and ships’ crew. There is evidence that the standards themselves foster these circumventions as the pollution prevention equipment is often poorly maintained of insufficient capacity and does not operate as designed. - In March 2006, the Marine Environmental Protection Committee (MEPC) of the IMO has invited member governments to provide concrete proposals, including draft MEPC circulars or proposed amendments to existing instruments, to address the operational problems most vessels are facing and what may the root causes of non-compliance. Conclusions - Although a general decline has been observed in marine oil pollution, there is also a shortage of long-term studies and of readily available and comparable information, which limits our understanding of the true impacts of oil pollution on marine wildlife and on seabird populations in particular. - Available knowledge seems to play very little part in orienting the decision in the planning of clean-up operations in the aftermath of oil incidents or in planning aerial surveillances of oil at sea. - The recently established EC website and JRC database clearly show that many instances of oil pollution are in fact avoidable, but even in Special Areas control measures have been inadequate to reduce and eliminate illegal spills. If illegal discharges are still as frequent as shown, states need to adopt far stricter systems of Port States and Flag State control, as well as effective monitoring and sanctioning procedures. - Increased enforcement, however, is only a partial and for many countries a costly solution. - Apart from the shortcomings in existing legislation and enforcement for preventing oil spills and illegal discharge of oil in sensitive sea areas such as MARPOL Special Areas and PSSAs, there is also a technical limitation in that the ecological criteria used to designate such areas fail to specifically address seabird sensitivity to oil as indicated by current data on seabird distribution and seasonal movement patterns. Details: Brussels, Belgium: Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, 2007. 88p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 22, 2019 at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.673&rep=rep1&type=pdf Year: 2007 Country: Europe URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287490104_Chronic_oil_pollution_in_Europe_a_status_report Shelf Number: 155997 Keywords: Chronic Oil Pollution Environmental Crime Maritime Crime Offences Against the Environment Pollution Toxic Pollutants |