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CVM gets a green light
Volume 2 6 / N u m b e r 3/March 1993
succession the European transport and environment ministers have taken part in a special meeting of the Environment and Transport Council. Shipping and environment groups have urged that they do not take any swift, ill thought-out actions. The Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) presented a paper which suggested that a valuable step would be enforcement of the existing regulation by ensuring their agencies had enough resources. PHILIPPA A M B R O S E
Oil Spill Plan for Solent A new comprehensive oil spill contingency plan called 'SOLSPILL' has just been published as part of the UK Solent and Southampton Water Marine Emergency Plan Revised Edition (SOLFIRE). The Solspill plan has been jointly devised and produced by the Harbour Master-Southampton and the Queen's Harbour MasterPlymouth, in consultation with the emergency services and local authorities. SOLFIRE has been developed to deal with any marine emergency occurring within the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, Southampton Water and the Solent on the southern coast of England. It is a voluntary scheme intended to provide the line of command, control and communications structure to draw together and co-ordinate the resources required to deal with marine emergencies, including oil spills. SOLF1RE is fully supplemented by other contingency and action plans held by the emergency services, local authorities, commercial and shipping companies.
CVM Gets A Green Light The panel of experts set up by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year to consider Contingency Valuation Methodology (see Mar. Pollut. Bull. 24, 334) has concluded that it is sufficiently reliable to be used in assessing natural resources damage after an oil spill. This was the main conclusion of their report, published in January. The panel consisted of a sixmember Committee co-chaired by Dr Kenneth Arrow and Dr Robert Solow, both Nobel Laureates in economics. The report, however, does not endorse the use of CVM as the sole determinant of such values but claims that such studies contain information that judges and juries will wish to use in combination with other evidence, including the testimony of expert witnesses. Many lawyers, psychologists and the oil transport industry claim that CVM is too prone to human bias and over-exaggeration of values which can lead to unfairly large damage awards. CVM involves sampling a representative portion of the population to determine the monetary values they put on damaged or destroyed natural resources even though they may not use them. The values obtained are then extrapolated to cover the entire population. In the
United States this would involve over 100 million households, values reaching billions of dollars for a single oil spill. The Committee state that the reliability of CVM in assessing passive-use values could only be assured if the studies adhered closely to an extensive set of guidelines contained in its report. It has also called on the US government to begin to accumulate standard damage assessments for a range of oil spill sizes and types.
Safety and Pollution-Prevention Standards Set to Rise The International Maritime Organization's campaign to raise the safety and pollution-prevention standards of the world's merchant shipping fleet will receive a major boost this year with the formation of a new body responsible for ensuring that 1MO regulations are properly enforced by Governments. The new Sub-Committee on Flag State Implementation will be a subsidiary body of IMO's two senior technical committees, the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) and the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). Its primary task will be to identify measures necessary to ensure the effective and consistent implementation of the convention, codes and other regulations that have been adopted by IMO, a specialized agency of the United Nations which is based in London. Many of these instruments have been so widely accepted by the world's shipping nations that it is theoretically impossible to operate a ship internationally that does not conform to IMO standards. But, at the same time, casualty returns and other statistics show that accident rates vary considerably from flag to flag. The reason is that although IMO measures are very widely accepted, the way in which they are implemented differs from country to country. According to the Secretary-General of IMO, Mr William A O'Neill, "The fact that the major shipowning countries have all ratified the most important IMO treaties means that safety and pollution standards should be roughly the same all over the world. However, the safety gap between the best countries and the worst is now so great that IMO is seriously concerned. It is hoped that the establishment of this new sub-committee will help close the gap" The role of the flag State--the country whose flag a ship flies--is crucial to the success of IMO measures since it is these Governments that are responsible for implementing them. In some cases, the task of inspecting ships for compliance and issuing appropriate certificates may be delegated to classification societies and similar bodies but the responsibility still rests with the Government concerned. Sometimes, however, Governments lack the resources and expertise necessary to carry out these responsibilities effectively and, as a result, sub-standard ships and operators can go undetected. A key task of the new sub-committee will be to identify the problems 117
succession the European transport and environment ministers have taken part in a special meeting of the Environment and Transport Council. Shipping and environment groups have urged that they do not take any swift, ill thought-out actions. The Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) presented a paper which suggested that a valuable step would be enforcement of the existing regulation by ensuring their agencies had enough resources. PHILIPPA A M B R O S E
Oil Spill Plan for Solent A new comprehensive oil spill contingency plan called 'SOLSPILL' has just been published as part of the UK Solent and Southampton Water Marine Emergency Plan Revised Edition (SOLFIRE). The Solspill plan has been jointly devised and produced by the Harbour Master-Southampton and the Queen's Harbour MasterPlymouth, in consultation with the emergency services and local authorities. SOLFIRE has been developed to deal with any marine emergency occurring within the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, Southampton Water and the Solent on the southern coast of England. It is a voluntary scheme intended to provide the line of command, control and communications structure to draw together and co-ordinate the resources required to deal with marine emergencies, including oil spills. SOLF1RE is fully supplemented by other contingency and action plans held by the emergency services, local authorities, commercial and shipping companies.
CVM Gets A Green Light The panel of experts set up by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year to consider Contingency Valuation Methodology (see Mar. Pollut. Bull. 24, 334) has concluded that it is sufficiently reliable to be used in assessing natural resources damage after an oil spill. This was the main conclusion of their report, published in January. The panel consisted of a sixmember Committee co-chaired by Dr Kenneth Arrow and Dr Robert Solow, both Nobel Laureates in economics. The report, however, does not endorse the use of CVM as the sole determinant of such values but claims that such studies contain information that judges and juries will wish to use in combination with other evidence, including the testimony of expert witnesses. Many lawyers, psychologists and the oil transport industry claim that CVM is too prone to human bias and over-exaggeration of values which can lead to unfairly large damage awards. CVM involves sampling a representative portion of the population to determine the monetary values they put on damaged or destroyed natural resources even though they may not use them. The values obtained are then extrapolated to cover the entire population. In the
United States this would involve over 100 million households, values reaching billions of dollars for a single oil spill. The Committee state that the reliability of CVM in assessing passive-use values could only be assured if the studies adhered closely to an extensive set of guidelines contained in its report. It has also called on the US government to begin to accumulate standard damage assessments for a range of oil spill sizes and types.
Safety and Pollution-Prevention Standards Set to Rise The International Maritime Organization's campaign to raise the safety and pollution-prevention standards of the world's merchant shipping fleet will receive a major boost this year with the formation of a new body responsible for ensuring that 1MO regulations are properly enforced by Governments. The new Sub-Committee on Flag State Implementation will be a subsidiary body of IMO's two senior technical committees, the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) and the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). Its primary task will be to identify measures necessary to ensure the effective and consistent implementation of the convention, codes and other regulations that have been adopted by IMO, a specialized agency of the United Nations which is based in London. Many of these instruments have been so widely accepted by the world's shipping nations that it is theoretically impossible to operate a ship internationally that does not conform to IMO standards. But, at the same time, casualty returns and other statistics show that accident rates vary considerably from flag to flag. The reason is that although IMO measures are very widely accepted, the way in which they are implemented differs from country to country. According to the Secretary-General of IMO, Mr William A O'Neill, "The fact that the major shipowning countries have all ratified the most important IMO treaties means that safety and pollution standards should be roughly the same all over the world. However, the safety gap between the best countries and the worst is now so great that IMO is seriously concerned. It is hoped that the establishment of this new sub-committee will help close the gap" The role of the flag State--the country whose flag a ship flies--is crucial to the success of IMO measures since it is these Governments that are responsible for implementing them. In some cases, the task of inspecting ships for compliance and issuing appropriate certificates may be delegated to classification societies and similar bodies but the responsibility still rests with the Government concerned. Sometimes, however, Governments lack the resources and expertise necessary to carry out these responsibilities effectively and, as a result, sub-standard ships and operators can go undetected. A key task of the new sub-committee will be to identify the problems 117