Role of Reporting in Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement of Ballast Water Management

The Decision Support System (DSS) for ballast water management in any given port is dependent on the availability of information on ballast water carried by a ship in advance. Collation of information through Ballast Water Reporting Forms (BWRF) has been adopted by several countries. This paper provides a comparison of the reporting forms adopted by some of the countries and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) recommended BWRF. The manually submitted reporting forms have several limitations and India has developed a self-validating Electronic Ballast Water Reporting Form (e-BWRF) to overcome such issues. In addition, the possible direction for reporting in the future is also presented.


INTRODUCTION
As much as 10 billion tonnes of ballast water is carried around the world per year, in turn carrying up to 7,000 species of aquatic plants, microbes and animals every hour of every day (The GloBallast Monograph, 2017).Ballast water is essential to the safe and efficient operation of shipping, but it also possesses a serious ecological, economic and health threat through the transfer of invasive aquatic species inadvertently carried in it.Ballast water contains a variety of organisms including bacteria, viruses, adult and larval stages of many marine animals and coastal plants.While the vast majority of such organisms will not survive to the point when the ballast water is discharged, some may survive and thrive in their new environment.These 'non-native species' , if they become established, can have serious ecological, economic and public health impacts on the receiving environment.The transfer of invasive marine species into new environments via ballast water has been identified as one of the major threats to the world's oceans.
The IMO adopted the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments (the Ballast Water Management or BWM Convention, 2004 edition) to regulate discharges of ballast water and reduce the risk of introducing non-native species from ships' ballast water.The BWM Convention imposes a challenging ballast water discharge standard.In response to this, a number of technologies have been developed and commercialised by different vendors.
This article gives an overview on what role reporting will play in compliance monitoring and enforcement of ballast water management.

WHY IS REPORTING IMPORTANT?
Ballast water reporting is important as it will give prior information to the receiving port as to which ship will be coming to their port, what is the IMO number, from where the ship has come, etc.It will also give information on ballast water, such as how much ballast water the ship is carrying in each tank and what is the total capacity of the ship.Further it will provide information on whether there has been ballast water exchange, if so where the exchange took place, which tanks were exchanged and the quantity of ballast water exchanged.

HOW REPORTING IS DONE TODAY
The ballast water reporting form as per the IMO Res. 868(20) is shown in Figure 1.The form requires information about the vessel, ballast water on board, ballast water capacity, and history of ballast water (INTERTANKO, 2000).This form is filled by the first or the second officer and signed by the Chief Officer of the ship and is handed over at the port of arrival.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF BALLAST WATER REPORTING FORMS
It is not mandatory to submit the form till the convention is in force.However many port states have made it mandatory and have come up with their own BWRF's BWRFs play a critical role in collating data regarding ballast water discharge or uptake at any given port and serves to overcome the limitations of manually submitted reporting forms.Hence India has chosen to develop a self-validating Electronic Ballast Water Reporting Form (e-BWRF).e-BWRF is being implemented on a voluntary basis at major ports of India.
in Table 3 and Figure 2. In a second case study, 1925 paper forms were evaluated.Of the 1925 paper forms examined, only 454 forms were found valid and the rest (1471) were considered as invalid (76%) due to variou errors as indicated in Table 4 and Figure 3.
Since the e-BWRF are self-validating, all of these forms can be utilized in the risk assessment database.In this context, the e-BWRF has many simple value-added features which make submission of reporting form easy and is available on the website http:/ /www.bwmindia.com.

FUTURE SCENARIO -HOW REPORTING CAN BE DONE IN THE FUTURE
The existing Ballast Water Reporting form caters mostly to the requirements of D-1 standards of the IMO BW convention.It is pertinent to note that there will be treatment technologies fitted on board progressively to meet D-2 standards of the IMO convention and also referred to as Performance Standard (Lauridsen & Overgaard 2016).In view of this, it would be important for the port state control to have advance information of (a) the treatment technology or ballast water management system employed on the vessel, (b) the approving administration of such a system and (c) details of the treatment measures carried out.
In another scenario it is also possible to have risk based exemption as provided in the convention and that would to a certain extent be dependent on a commonality of the diversity of organisms at the source and discharge ports, oceanographic features and risk assessment.
In view of this it is essential to look at the designing of BWRFs that add information on the treatment technology and/or the risk assessment based exemptions.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Percentage of ballast water reporting forms (paper) in case study (1) with & without errors.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Percentage of ballast water reporting forms (paper) in case study (2) with & without errors.
. A comparison of information in BWRFs sought from different countries (India, Canada, United States and Australia) with the BWRF of IMO is shown in Table 1.Additional information sought by individual countries like Canada, United States and Australia which are not mentioned in IMO BWRF is shown in Table 2.

Table 3 .
Scrutiny report of Ballast Water Reporting Forms (Paper).

Table 4 .
Scrutiny report of Ballast Water Reporting Forms (Paper).

Table 2 .
Additional information sought in Ballast Water Reporting Forms (BWRF) by Canada and Australia.