IMO has outlined key insights for tackling marine pollution incidents at the International Oil Spill Conference (IOSC 2024) in New Orleans, United States (13-16 May).
Under the theme 'Prevent, Prepare, Respond, Restore', hundreds of professionals from the international spill response community, private sector, government, and non-governmental organizations came together to discuss challenges, innovation and share spill preparedness and response expertise from around the world.
Topics covered included: alternate fuels as a pathway to decarbonization of the maritime transport sector; discussions on maintaining preparedness in a continuously evolving pollution risk landscape; innovation in surveillance, monitoring and visualization; and oiled wildlife.
IMO's Patricia Charlebois, Deputy Director, Subdivision for Implementation, Marine Environment Division, delivered a session highlighting the importance of regional and international cooperation in emergency response and preparedness and a case study on a floating storage and offloading unit FSO Safer located off the coast of Yemen. IMO has played a key supporting role in the United Nations-coordinated initiative aimed at preventing an oil spill from the FSO Safer, which is moored off the coast of Yemen. The ship-to-ship transfer of more than 1.1 million barrels of oil from the decaying floating storage and offloading unit FSO Safer to a replacement tanker, the Yemen (formerly known as the Nautica) was completed 11 August 2023.
IMO's Integrated Technical Cooperation Programme (ITCP) funded the participation of eight delegates from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago to attend the conference. Delegates were able to undertake a number of short courses on basic oil spill forecasting and modelling, oil spill response in river environments, shoreline clean-up assessment techniques, and fundamentals of oil spill response.
The IMO's e-Learning course ʺAn Introduction to Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Cooperationʺ was promoted at the conference. This self-enrolled course, which is available in English, French and Spanish, provides individuals new to the oil spill response community with a comprehensive overview of the essential elements of oil spill preparedness and response. This course, as well as future remote courses are part of the IMO e-Learning portal, created to increase the capacity of Member States to effectively implement IMO instruments.
IMO is a regular contributor and sponsor of the triennial oil pollution prevention, preparedness and response Conference Series, composed of the three international conferences for the Americas (IOSC), Europe (INTERSPILL) and Asia (SPILLCON), respectively. The baton was passed to INTERSPILL, the next in the triennial conference series, to be held in London in 2025 (which IMO co-sponsors through the Integrated Technical Cooperation programme).