BY LORETTA B MANELE
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has recently developed a guideline on disposal of fiberglass boats.
Zulla Mohammed, Pollution Advisor for SPREP (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme) stated this at the “Strengthening Marine Pollution Incident Resilience in the Pacific Islands” workshop at the Heritage Park Hotel earlier this month.
He said they know that from the individual maritime administration in the region, the disposal of fiberglass boats is one of the biggest challenges in the pacific region.
Mohammed said they are going to start off with national level consultation in terms of what individual countries would want to actually capture in a regional strategy and action plan tailored to individual countries’ needs.
He added that they will also try and evaluate the effectiveness of the current clean up strategy that they have, which has a component on marine pollution.
“But at the end of the day, I think what still needs to be decided through our consultation is the approach”
“But at the same time, looking at our backyard, I think it’s not only the World War II wrecks, it’s basically every other wreck that would be emanating from your domestic shipping industry, if not from the shipping industry”
Mohammed pointed out that they understand that the current strategy does not cover all of it, and thus are going to revise it.
He said knowing that this has become a bigger challenge for them, there are other initiatives through SPREP that is building capacity for SPREP countries and one of those is PacPlan which is a framework to help pacific island countries develop their own contingency plans.
“PacPlan, of course, is only focusing on oil pollution, but if you guys in the maritime industry follow what is really happening on the climate mitigation and adaptation side of things through IMO, we are moving into new fuels”
Mohammed mentioned that what they are actually trying to capture as part of their new PacPlan iniative is to not only focus on oil spills but to also look at chemical spills.
He said apart from World War II wrecks, they will also be looking basically at potential polluting wrecks in the region.
“That’s inclusive of fishing vessels in the region. Apart from that, we are working with development partners, donors, scientific organisations to help our members to manage the different type of wrecks that we have in the region”
