Issues relating to Ballast Water under the International Environmental Law

Abstract

Before the high trend of globalization, it was difficult or extremely restricted for plants and animals to move from one place where they have lived to other places strange to them and settle because there are many natural barriers such as oceans, mountains or wide range of deserts. Over 70% of the earth is covered by water. For centuries, sea has been used the way to transport materials such as food or manufactured goods. The growth of global trade has caused the result of increase of the number of ships to transport the goods from one country to another where each environmental circumstance of sea or ocean is different. Over 80% of all goods have been transported by ships and at the same time ballast water of about 4 to 5 billion tones per year is exhausted by the ships. In the past twenty years, the issues of marine pollution have been focused on the aftermath of large scale of accidents by oil tankers, particularly relating to oil spills. A representative instance is the Prestige accident. Further, increasing use of huge bulk ships to transport goods or raw materials has attracted concerns from the international environmentalist over the management of shipping, in order to mitigate disasters and develop new agreed order. In the 1980s a new important issue relating to the routine operation of ships became highlighted in the international environmental world. Ships take living aquatic organisms in ballast water and de-ballast those into the sea of loading port. As a result of that, any harmful plants or animals that can cause serious effect have been moved to other ecological systems. That is to say, shipping has caused a major impact on the balance of nature in the ports, seas and oceans by the carriage and discharge of unwanted and sometimes dangerous species of diseases, animals and plants in their ballast water. For example the green crab, the Asian basket clam and the mitten crab have had the greatest effect on the ocean environment in America. This was one of the reasons that ballast water issue became recognized as a serious threat to the ocean environment and human-beings. This issue was driven by mainly Australia, America and Norway. Although not only ballast water is the threat to the ocean environment, but fouled ship hulls, bait fish shipments, and deliberate introductions of species used for food in other parts of the world or originally acquired for aquarium use can cause the same result, ballast water issue becomes the main concern to be addressed by the international society. From the perspective of international environmental law, those issues are related to the precautionary principle, sovereignty and its limitation, preventive protection and biodiversity protection. On top of that, it is need to notice that without international co-operation to prevent adverse effect of ballast water and to develop new technology the problem cannot be solved. So, in this research the definition of ballast water, its necessity and the problems of it, and the issues which are related to environmental law principles will be discussed.