Is a Stringent National Regime (OPA 90) More Effective than an

International Regime (MARPOL) in the Bid to Control Marine Pollution?

Abstract LLM in Maritime Law Dissertation

Vijay HiranandaniLondon Metropolitan University

Shipping is a global industry vital to global economy with 85% of world trade in terms of weight being transported by sea. Modern times focus on globalization, technological change and environmental concerns.

Transporting goods by sea creates marine pollution by introduction of substances in marine environment directly or indirectly by man. This causes hazards to marine environment, human health, marine activities, and harms the quality of seawater.

The increasing marine trade of oil and hazardous substances threatens marine environment, with oil pollution having the highest public profile.

Environmental damage from marine pollution causes economic losses due to compensation to claimants of marine casualty causing or threatening environmental pollution.

These factors led to development of various national and international regimes to control marine pollution. This paper focused mainly on two such regimes – MARPOL & OPA.

MARPOL deals with marine pollution from various harmful substances in international seas while OPA deals with claims for oil-spill incidents impacting or substantially threatening U.S. navigable waters.

OPA imposes higher limits of liability and heavier fines for environmental damage. OPA’s logic is that even minor oil spills can significantly damage marine ecology with its chain reactions.

Researching from various stakeholder perspectives illuminated OPA to be more effective than MARPOL in controlling marine pollution. Both regimes portray many good and difficult issues.

A critical synopsis from different sources of information revealed that overall OPA has been more effective, by virtue of its stringency. However, some of OPA’s aspects, such as strict liability and criminal prosecution of seafarers, have been criticized heavily and need to be reviewed and improved.

Yet, OPA provides better protection for the marine environment by necessitating and enforcing compliance with its provisions in order to allow tanker-trade within U.S. waters.

Industrialists and businesses are bound to oppose OPA’s stringency. For instance, when people comply with the law in good faith, the threat of strict liability is unlikely to elicit improved performance.

However, such universal compliance may seem to happen only in the ideal instead of the real world situations. Therefore, if strict liability is imposed, it may not necessarily harm those complying, but could help improve compliance from those attempting to evade the law.

This calls for a balanced care from the judicial system so that those who comply with the law in good faith should find compliance worthwhile without being let down.

Objectively, from the marine pollution perspective, OPA’s designers have been more or less on the right track. Apart from its detrimental effects to trade and commerce due to some of its provisions, OPA’s beneficial efforts to protect the environment and related human-health factors should also be looked at.

It is high time businesses and industries realize that temporary monetary gains at the expense of harming our environment is an insensible option for it bounces back on humankind somewhere or the other. Lack of care or harm to our environment will only make our world a worse place to live in for ourselves and our future generations.

To a certain extent, there has been a lack of international will to implement MARPOL. Thus, it is imperative that the international community should strive hard to implement MARPOL more effectively and grasp OPA’s finer points to protect the worldwide marine environment in areas of its jurisdiction.

It takes a long time to build a good environment that will shower its benefits on humankind. However, it may take only a few seconds during maritime spill disasters to create havoc in marine biodiversity and related chain effects to human health, apart from economic and livelihood losses to local communities.

Even from a purely economic point of view, critics should note that preventing marine pollution is beneficial for overall good instead of being careless, negligent, eluding compliance, or intentionally harming the marine environment.

Just as we cannot throw our trash into other people’s homes, ships should not be allowed to pollute local or international marine waters and harm others’ local livelihoods, health and marine biodiversity.

These factors necessitate the careful protection of the marine environment. The research concluded that overall a stringent national regime such as the well enforced OPA has been more effective in controlling marine pollution than the not-so-well enforced MARPOL.