Implementation and Impacts of Emission Control Areas

Emission Control Areas (ECAs) are geographical locations designated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to reduce the negative impacts of shipping on health and biodiversity. The first ECA was adopted in 2005 in the Baltic Sea and three more have followed. Since 2004, the 21 countries located around the Mediterranean Sea have discussed the introduction of an ECA, and the final adoption by the IMO occurred in 2022, 18 years later. In this first research, we apply Kingdon’s Multiple Streams policy framework to a case study of this successful project in order to identify the key success factors that may be generalized to the difficult process  of international environmental policymaking in the maritime sector. The findings revealed that policy entrepreneurs were able to align the three streams by financing studies and workshops (problem stream), adopting an existing successful policy (policy stream) and leveraging an existing close political relationship in the EU (politics stream) as well as overcoming issues raised by other parties through further analysis and studies showing the benefit of the ECA policy for all Mediterranean countries (linking the problem and policy streams). The study also highlighted the importance of first achieving regional agreement before approaching the IMO global level, a  lesson that may also be pertinent to other areas of maritime policy making.

Furthermore, most research on ECAs has been conducted within the framework of ex-ante studies and optimization strategy modeling, leaving little room for evaluating ECA policies in practice. This may be attributed to limited access to data, which can lead to insufficient validation of hypotheses. Consequently, this second research project aims to examine the ex-post impacts of introducing stricter SOx restriction policies on specific outcomes overlooked in the literature, such as the impacts on port calls depending on the compliance option chosen, as well as the impacts of fleet ownership composition entering SECA. This ex-post study is particularly important given the growing number of SECAs such as in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Canadian Arctic Sea.

Alice THEBAULT, PhD student in economics. Before becoming an academic, Alice worked for an international air brokerage company specializing in the transportation of hazardous materials. She obtained her master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris and then joined KEDGE to pursue her thesis. Her research topic in maritime transport focuses on the study of emission control areas in the Mediterranean basin combining econometrics and geopolitical analyses.