Reporter Liu Xiao

The signi fi cance of the “Polar Rule”

Reporter Liu Xiao

The Polar Rule came into force on January 1, 2017. What is the signif i cance of implementing the Polar Rule?

An insider admitted to reporters in the interview that in his point of view, the more profound meaning of the "polar rule" is to strengthen the consistency and weaken the regional behavior of individual countries under the framework of international law. Nowadays, as a unified international law, the polar rule can be said to be very useful for the harmonization of international law to avoid a single act of regional regulations. Judging from technical point of view, the mandatory “polar rule” also provide many safety and environmental requirements for ships navigated in the polar area which are different from conventional ships. When talking about Arctic ship operations, people tend to focus on the environmental protection of the pure land. John Maggs, chairman of the World Clean Shipping Federation had commented on “the polar rules”: “the purpose to establish polar rule is to ensure no harm to environment and life caused by increasing polar shipping activities. However, judged from the current situation, the polar rule may not achieve its intended purpose.” In this interview, some industry insiders also told reporters about some related issues. In an interview, one of the industry insiders raised a question to reporter: “relating to the current situation on annex IV (sewage), PSCO only carries out supervision by checking the sewage treatment equipment operation and discharging records in the polar waters. Personally, I think the supervision intensity may not be enough to adapt to the fragile ecological environment.”

An expert said in an interview, the mandatory “polar rule” for ships navigated in polar area put forward a lot of safety and environmental requirements different from conventional ships. Apart from that, as a risk-based rule, the polar rule also relate to many factors such as the factors of ship design and construction, human operationfactors, navigation management factors, maritime supervision factors and so on. Therefore, the introduction of the polar rules put forward higher requirements both for design, shipbuilding, shipping and maritime management.

As to how to seize the opportunity, experts said that we have several problems to solve in terms of technology. First of all, our country has built a number of large test pools, but is still lack of the ones which can test and do research on ships navigated in polar area. Secondly, the design of polar ship must pay most attention to the research and development of marine equipment establishment technology. Affected by various conditions, the design for polar ship became more and more challenging, it is needed to maintain a reasonable balance between environment protection and effective exploitation in ice region and seek effective and rational solutions.

For decades, the navigational security in the polar region largely depends on a few of experienced senior off i cers in several countries, but the experienced seafarers are very few. A lot of education and training institutions in many countries of the world have carried out relevant trainings, especially for countries surrounded the Arctic ice areas i.e. Canada, Russia, Finland and other countries. The training courses and content have been relatively comprehensive and systematic. However, the relevant training and education institutions providing polar navigation training in China are basically none, so there is a lack of basic conditions for carrying out training of polar ship operators in china. In addition, the ships navigated in polar area will face a lot of special risks, bad weather conditions, relative lack of navigation data. Ships navigating in this area will face huge challenges such as lack of navigation data, communication system and navigation aid facilities that are not perfect etc.