Potentially Polluting Wrecks

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Potentially Polluting Wrecks

Potentially Polluting Wrecks

Lloyd’s Register Foundation supports research, innovation, and education to engineer a safer world. Ocean safety is a particular focus and we aim to direct funding to support effective and long-lasting interventions to address the most pressing challenges across ocean sectors, infrastructures, and communities.

The Problem

'There are an estimated 3 million sunken and abandoned vessels in the ocean, over 8,500 of which are classified as ‘potentially polluting wrecks’. The majority of these wrecks date back to World War I and II (WWI and WWII) and contain harmful chemical pollutants, unexploded munitions and an estimated 6 billion gallons of heavy fuel oil. This is 545 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez leak in 1989 and 30 times that of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, both of which had severe and long-lasting environmental consequences.

Severe weather events resulting from climate change are likely to speed up the process of wrecks breaking apart. After more than 75 years of corrosion, leaks from sunken vessels are expected to reach their highest levels within ten years but scientists do not yet have enough data to forecast when or where individual leaks will occur. The financial cost of responding to pollution from wrecks is prohibitively expensive for developing nations. It is also unclear who is responsible for this cost. Many of the countries most affected were not participants in WWI and WWII, and ships sunk in war remain owned by the country they sailed for under the principle of sovereign immunity.

The lack of data and international cooperation on how to manage pollution from wrecks means many governments do not act proactively to prevent leaks. Therefore, responses are often too late to prevent serious harm to marine ecosystems and the health and livelihoods of coastal communities.' - International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

Our Heritage & Education Centre team has identified hazardous shipwrecks as an issue where our combination of funding and knowledge networks could be very impactful. We will contribute to the development of technical standards and protocols helping to move away from the current 'emergency response' mode of intervention toward a more strategic approach. We believe that this is especially important in less developed economies where certain coastal nations (such as the Philippines) have many hazardous wrecks but very limited technical and financial resources with which to manage the threat.

We have begun to build coalitions (including International Committee on Monuments and Sties (ICOMOS) and The Ocean Foundation, among others) to convene a community of experts and agencies to define these standards for use globally. To-date we have funded a programme of activity that has two main components: a publication, due late 2023, that will collate current knowledge on regulatory and legal issues alongside current best practice on remediation on PPWs; and a series of expert workshops, commencing in early 2024, that will focus on development and dissemination of an International Standard to optimise evaluation methodology and engineering interventions.

We have also funded the secretariat of the Cultural Heritage Framework Programme of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development to enhance engagement between heritage bodies and wide ocean stewardship efforts; and support the United National Global Compact and the High-Level Climate Champions team to work on blue finance and low carbon shipping.

We believe that the programme of work that Lloyd’s Register Foundation is supporting is closely aligned with the IUCN Resolutions that call for a toolkit to evaluate the threat of oil pollution from shipwrecks, identification of possible solutions and the sharing associated innovation and best practice.

While the work that we fund directly is focused on safety and engineering solutions, legacy wrecks also pose great threats to biodiversity and the stability of coastal communities. We believe that new funding arrangements are required to enable interventions and safeguard coastal and marine ecosystems.

Action to prevent pollution leaking is critical for safety - to protect human and environmental health.