Dumping and oil pollution: Regulatory approaches for vessel operations in an ice‐free Central Arctic Ocean

• Author: Pirjo Kleemola‐Juntunen,Stefan Kirchner
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12246

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Dumping and oil pollution: Regulatory approaches for vessel

operations in an ice-free Central Arctic Ocean

Stefan Kirchner

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Pirjo Kleemola-Juntunen

Correspondence

Email: stefan.kirchner@ulapland.fi Abstract

Pollution of the seas by ships has long been an international regulatory concern.

International law is mainly reactive in nature, responding to specific needs for regu-

lation. Because lawmaking at the international level can be a slow-moving process,

it is important to determine such regulatory needs early on. This article asks the

question whether the regulatory possibilities that exist today are sufficient to pro-

tect the Central Arctic Ocean from vessel-based pollution, with a focus on oil pollu-

tion and dumping. It analyses different legal tools with a view to their suitability for

the protection of the Central Arctic Ocean against future threats of pollution from

vessels operating in the area. It will be shown that, though imperfect and incom-

plete, rules are already in place which enable the international community to take

action to protect the Central Arctic Ocean against dumping and deliberate oil

pollution.

1

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INTRODUCTION

By 2040, the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) will be ice free, at least in

the summer.

1

The CAO is defined here as the area of the Arctic

Ocean which for all of human history has been, and currently still is,

covered by ice and where there have never been any above-surface

shipping activities for commercial or recreational purposes (thereby

excluding military activities, in particular submarine operations, for

which information will often be classified and hence difficult or

impossible to verify, making them unsuitable as a marker for the

measurement of the scope of navigational activities in the CAO

area). The term ‘ice free’is understood here in the sense that an

area is ice free if it is usable for commercial or recreational naviga-

tional purposes at the surface of the ocean.

2

While the findings of this article will likely also apply to those

parts of the Arctic Ocean where shipping is already happening today,

such as the North West Passage (NWP) or the Northern Sea Route

(NSR), this article is primarily concerned with the CAO. As the NWP

and the NSR already provide cheaper alternatives to routes from East

and Southeast Asia to Europe and to the East coast of North Amer-

ica, respectively, it appears likely that the CAO will also be used for

shipping.

3

In the future, the North Pole area, which today is under

ice, will provide an alternative to a number of currently existing sea

routes: the connection between Asia and Europe through the Suez

Canal, around Africa or along the NSR, but also the connection

between Asia and the East coast of North America and even between

different locations on the same continent, for instance between the

Western and Eastern coasts of North America or potentially even

between the far Northeast of Russia and the Kola peninsula.

As the volume of shipping is likely to increase, so is the likeli-

hood for vessel-borne pollution of the marine environment. This will

give rise to problems which have been around for a long time, such

as dumping and oil spills, on which we will focus in this article. The

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1

‘The Arctic as it is Known Today is Almost Certainly Gone’(The Economist, 29 April

2017). Other authors come to other conclusions with regard to the timing, e.g., 2020–2030

(JE Overland and M Wang, ‘When Will the Summer Arctic be Nearly Sea Ice Free?’(2013)

40 Geophysical Research Letters 2097) or around 2100 (J Bo

e, A Hall and X Qu, ‘Septem-

ber Sea-Ice Cover in the Arctic Ocean Projected to Vanish by 2100’(2009) 2 Nature Geo-

science 341; see also ‘Erratum’(2009) 2 Nature Geoscience 444).

2

From a natural sciences perspective, ‘ice free’is usually understood to refer to a situation

in which the summer ice covers a surface of 1 million km

2

or less, as opposed to 7 million

km

2

when measurements began in the late 1970s or just over 3 million km

2

, the record low

in 2012.

3

See, e.g., M Humpert and A Raspotnik, ‘The Future of Arctic Shipping Along the Transpolar

Sea Route’(2012) 1 Arctic Yearbook 281.

DOI: 10.1111/reel.12246

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/reel RECIEL. 2018;27:28–34.