MARPOL Annex I Special Areas: oil-discharge zones

A MARPOL Annex I Special Area is a sea area where, for recognized technical reasons relating to its oceanographic and ecological condition and to the character of its traffic, the convention requires special mandatory methods for the prevention of oil pollution that go beyond the general discharge regime. The concept is defined in Regulation 1 of the revised MARPOL Annex I adopted by resolution MEPC.117(52), in force 1 January 2007, and the operative discharge controls sit in Regulation 15 (oil and oily mixtures from machinery spaces of all ships) and Regulation 34 (oil and oily mixtures from the cargo area of oil tankers). Annex I lists ten Special Areas: the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Gulfs area, the Gulf of Aden, the Antarctic area (south of 60 degrees South), the North West European Waters, the Oman area of the Arabian Sea, and the Southern South African waters. Inside a Special Area the discharge of oil from a tanker’s cargo area is prohibited outright, machinery-space discharge is cut to processed effluent below 15 ppm under strict conditions, and a Special Area’s stricter requirements take effect only after the bordering states notify IMO that adequate port reception facilities are in place. That reception-facility precondition is why three of the ten areas, despite being adopted and in force as treaty text, are not yet operative.

This article maps the Special Area concept onto the ten Annex I areas with their adoption, entry-into-force and in-effect dates, sets out the discharge arithmetic inside versus outside a Special Area, and separates a MARPOL Special Area from an Emission Control Area under Annex VI and from a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area. It links the machinery-space discharge controls in Regulation 15, the recording obligations in the Oil Record Book under Regulation 17, and the polar uplift through the Antarctic special area and Polar Code regime.

The Special Area concept under Regulation 1

Regulation 1 of Annex I defines a Special Area as “a sea area where for recognized technical reasons in relation to its oceanographical and ecological condition and to the particular character of its traffic the adoption of special mandatory methods for the prevention of sea pollution by oil is required.” Three tests sit inside that sentence, and a proposing state has to satisfy all three before MEPC will designate an area. The oceanographic test asks whether the water exchanges slowly: enclosed and semi-enclosed seas with restricted circulation, like the Mediterranean and the Baltic, concentrate any oil that enters them rather than dispersing it to the open ocean. The ecological test asks whether the area holds resources or habitats that an oil load would damage out of proportion to the volume spilled: spawning grounds, reefs, ice-edge ecosystems, migratory routes. The traffic test asks whether the density and type of shipping, in particular tanker traffic, raises the baseline discharge risk above what the general regime can absorb.

A Special Area is not the same instrument as the general distance-and-rate controls that apply everywhere. Outside a Special Area the convention tolerates a small, metered, en-route discharge of treated oily water on the theory that the open ocean dilutes it. Inside a Special Area that tolerance is withdrawn or sharply reduced because the receiving water cannot dilute the load. The Special Area is therefore a geographic switch: cross the boundary and the discharge rules change from “metered discharge permitted under conditions” to “no discharge” or “15 ppm only,” depending on the stream and the area.

The regime governs operational discharge, not accidental spillage. Annex I draws a hard line between the two. A Special Area prohibition bears on what a ship may deliberately pump overboard in the course of normal operations: bilge water, tank washings, line drainings, slops. It does not address the oil released by a collision, a grounding, or a hull failure, which is the domain of the construction standards (double hull, fuel tank protection, damage stability) and the casualty-response and liability conventions. A Special Area does not make a spill more or less unlawful; it makes the routine, metered, lawful-elsewhere discharge unlawful inside the boundary. The two systems work in parallel: the construction and casualty rules cut the volume released when something goes wrong, and the Special Area discharge rules cut the volume released when everything is going right. Conflating them produces the common misstatement that a Special Area “bans oil pollution,” when what it bans is the operational discharge that the general regime would otherwise permit under conditions.

Special Areas are designated by amendment to the relevant annex, adopted as an MEPC resolution under the tacit-acceptance procedure of the MARPOL Convention. The same area can be a Special Area under more than one annex: the Antarctic is a Special Area under Annex I (oil), Annex V (garbage), and, with a reservation, Annex IV (sewage). The annex-by-annex designation matters because the boundary coordinates and the in-effect trigger are set separately in each annex, and an area can be operative under one annex while still dormant under another.

The designation route is worth tracing because it explains why the dates fall where they do. A coastal state or group of states submits a proposal to MEPC with supporting oceanographic, ecological and traffic data. MEPC refers it to the Sub-Committee on Pollution Prevention and Response for technical review, then adopts the amendment by resolution. Under tacit acceptance the amendment enters into force on a fixed date unless a defined number of parties object beforehand, which removes the need for each state to ratify separately and is why MARPOL amendments move faster than amendments to most treaties. The five 1973 areas were not the product of this proposal route: they were written into the original convention text, which is why they share the 1973 adoption date and the 1983 in-force date with Annex I itself. Every area added later, from the Gulf of Aden in 1987 onward, came through the proposal-and-resolution route, which is why each carries its own distinct adoption date.

The “particular character of its traffic” test in the Regulation 1 definition is easy to read past but does real work. An enclosed sea with little tanker traffic and no sensitive habitat would fail the test even if its water exchanged slowly; the designation has to be justified by the pollution risk that ships actually pose there. The Southern South African waters case turns largely on this limb: the Cape route carries a heavy stream of laden tankers that cannot use the Suez Canal, often the largest crude carriers afloat, past a coastline with strong currents and rich fisheries. The traffic and the consequences of a discharge, not an enclosed-basin argument, carried that designation.

The ten Annex I Special Areas with their dates

The ten Annex I Special Areas carry three distinct dates that practitioners confuse at their peril: the date the designation was adopted, the date it entered into force as treaty text, and the date its stricter discharge requirements actually took effect. The last of these is gated on reception facilities and is the date that governs onboard compliance.

The Mediterranean, Baltic, Black Sea, Red Sea and the Gulfs were written into the 1973 convention itself, adopted 2 November 1973, and entered into force with Annex I on 2 October 1983. The Gulf of Aden was added by resolution in 1987 and the Antarctic by resolution MEPC.42(30) of 16 November 1990. The North West European Waters area, the Oman area, and the Southern South African waters are the later additions. Three of the original group, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Oman area, sit in force as text but have never taken effect because the bordering states have not lodged the reception-facility notification that the convention requires before the prohibitions bite.

Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Special Area runs from the Strait of Gibraltar in the west to the entrance of the Dardanelles in the east. It is the densest tanker-traffic enclosed sea in the world and the slowest to flush: the basin exchanges water with the Atlantic only through the narrow Gibraltar sill, so oil that enters tends to stay. The Mediterranean has been a Special Area since Annex I took effect in 1983, and the same waters now also carry the Mediterranean Sea SECA for sulphur, in effect since 1 May 2025, a separate Annex VI designation covered in Emission Control Areas. The two regimes share the map but not the regulation: the Annex I Special Area controls oil into the water, the SECA controls sulphur into the air.

Baltic Sea

The Baltic Special Area covers the Baltic Sea proper together with the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland, and the entrance bounded by the parallel of the Skaw in the Skagerrak. The Baltic is brackish, shallow, and almost entirely enclosed, with a water-residence time measured in decades, which is why it carried Special Area status from the start and why the bordering states reinforce the IMO regime through the Helsinki Commission. As with the Mediterranean, the Baltic is simultaneously an Annex VI Emission Control Area for both sulphur and NOx, so a ship in the Baltic complies with the oil-discharge Special Area and the air-emission ECA at once.

Black Sea

The Black Sea Special Area covers the whole Black Sea, bounded to the south-west by the parallel of latitude 41 degrees North between the Bosphorus and the Black Sea coast. Like the Mediterranean and the Baltic it is a semi-enclosed sea with a single narrow outlet, and it has held Special Area status under Annex I since 1983.

Red Sea

The Red Sea Special Area covers the Red Sea proper together with the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba, bounded to the south by the rhumb line between Ras si Ane and Husn Murad. It was adopted in 1973 and entered into force with Annex I in 1983, but its stricter discharge requirements have never taken effect. The bordering states have not jointly notified IMO that adequate reception facilities exist along the coastline, so a tanker transiting the Red Sea is, in practice, subject to the general Regulation 34 cargo-discharge regime rather than the Special Area prohibition. The point trips up crews who assume that “designated” means “operative”: for the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Oman area it does not.

Gulfs area

The Gulfs area means the sea area to the north-west of the rhumb line between Ras al Hadd and Ras al Fasteh, covering the Persian Gulf and the approaches. It was adopted in 1973 and in force in 1983 as text, but unlike the Red Sea it eventually crossed the reception-facility threshold: its requirements took effect on 1 August 2008 once the bordering states had notified adequate facilities. A tanker in the Gulfs today is under the full Special Area prohibition on cargo-area oil discharge.

Gulf of Aden

The Gulf of Aden Special Area lies between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, bounded to the west by the southern limit of the Red Sea area and to the east by the rhumb line between Ras Asir and Ras Fartak. It was a later addition, adopted 1 December 1987 and in force 1 April 1989. Like the Red Sea it remains designated but not in effect: the reception-facility notification is outstanding, so the Special Area discharge prohibition does not yet bind ships transiting the gulf.

Antarctic area

The Antarctic area means the sea area south of latitude 60 degrees South, with no longitudinal limit: the boundary is a complete latitudinal cap rather than a set of coordinates around a coastline. It was designated by resolution MEPC.42(30) of 16 November 1990 and took effect 17 March 1992. The Antarctic is the strictest of the ten areas: inside it any discharge into the sea of oil or oily mixture from any ship is prohibited, with no 15 ppm machinery-space allowance and no en-route cargo allowance. The 15 ppm filtering equipment under Regulation 14 must still work, but it does not unlock a discharge permission south of 60 degrees South. The Antarctic also carries a heavy-grade-oil ban under Regulation 43, in force since 1 August 2011, prohibiting both the carriage as cargo and the use as fuel of heavy grade oil in Antarctic waters. The full polar picture, including the Polar Code uplift, the heavy-grade-oil ban for polar waters context, and the Arctic counterpart, sits in the Antarctic special area and Polar Code regime article.

North West European Waters

The North West European Waters area covers the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the Celtic Sea, the English Channel and the waters off the west coast of Ireland and the United Kingdom out to defined coordinates, bounded broadly by the EEZ limits of the bordering states. It was adopted 25 September 1997, entered into force 1 February 1999, and took effect 1 August 1999. This area shows the gap between the in-force date and the in-effect date plainly: the text bound the parties from February 1999, but the discharge prohibition only governed ships from August 1999 once reception facilities were notified.

Oman area of the Arabian Sea

The Oman area of the Arabian Sea was adopted 15 October 2004 and entered into force 1 January 2007, coinciding with the revised Annex I. It covers the sea area off the Omani coast bounded by defined coordinates in the Arabian Sea. Like the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the Oman area is designated and in force as text but not yet in effect, pending the reception-facility notification from the bordering state.

Southern South African waters

The Southern South African waters area was adopted 13 October 2006, entered into force 1 March 2008, and took effect 1 August 2008. It covers the waters off the southern tip of Africa around the Cape, an area of dense tanker traffic on the Cape route with strong currents and a sensitive coastline. It is the most recent Annex I Special Area and, unlike the three dormant areas, it crossed the reception-facility threshold and is fully operative.

Discharge criteria inside versus outside a Special Area

The discharge arithmetic splits two ways: by stream (machinery-space bilge water under Regulation 15, versus cargo-area oil from tankers under Regulation 34) and by location (inside versus outside a Special Area). Confusing the two regimes is the most common error in onboard practice and in port-state-control interviews, because the two carry different numbers that look superficially similar.

Machinery-space discharge under Regulation 15

Regulation 15 governs oil and oily mixtures from machinery spaces of all ships of 400 gross tonnage and above. Outside a Special Area, a ship may discharge processed bilge water only when four conditions are met together: the ship is proceeding en route; the oily mixture is processed through the 15 ppm filtering equipment required by Regulation 14; the oil content of the effluent without dilution does not exceed 15 parts per million; and the oily mixture does not originate from cargo-pump-room bilges on a tanker or is not mixed with oil cargo residue. The 15 ppm limit is a concentration cap enforced by the oil filtering equipment and its 15 ppm alarm; there is no distance-from-land condition for the machinery-space stream outside a Special Area, only the en-route and concentration tests.

Inside a Special Area the machinery-space rule tightens. For ships of 400 gross tonnage and above the discharge of oily mixture is prohibited except when the same 15 ppm, en-route and equipment conditions are met and, where the ship is large enough to need it, an oil discharge monitoring and control system and an oil-water interface detector or oily-water-separating equipment are in operation. In the Antarctic area even this is withdrawn: any discharge of oil or oily mixture from any ship is prohibited outright. So the machinery-space progression is: outside a Special Area, 15 ppm processed effluent en route; inside most Special Areas, the same 15 ppm but with the full monitoring equipment running; in the Antarctic, zero.

Cargo-area discharge under Regulation 34

Regulation 34 governs oil and oily mixtures from the cargo area of oil tankers. Outside a Special Area a tanker may discharge only when every one of these conditions holds: the tanker is more than 50 nautical miles from the nearest land; it is proceeding en route; the instantaneous rate of discharge of oil content does not exceed 30 litres per nautical mile; the total quantity of oil discharged into the sea does not exceed, for existing tankers, 1/15,000 of the total quantity of the particular cargo of which the residue formed a part, and for new tankers 1/30,000; and the tanker has in operation an oil discharge monitoring and control system and a slop tank arrangement. The 30 litres per nautical mile is a rate, the 1/30,000 is a voyage total, and the 50 nautical miles is a distance: three different limits that all have to be satisfied at once.

Inside a Special Area, Regulation 34 prohibits any discharge of oil or oily mixture from the cargo area of an oil tanker. There is no 30 litres per nautical mile allowance, no en-route discharge window, no distance carve-out. The tanker holds its slops on board until it reaches a port reception facility or exits the Special Area. This is the sharpest practical difference between the two regimes: outside, a metered cargo discharge is lawful under conditions; inside, it is not.

The two regimes side by side

The figures repeated across maritime references carry traps. The 30 litres per nautical mile and the 1/30,000 apply to the tanker cargo regime, not to machinery-space bilge water, which is capped at 15 ppm. The 50 nautical mile distance belongs to the cargo regime and does not transfer to the machinery-space stream. The Oil Record Book is the documentary backstop for both: machinery-space operations in Part I and cargo and ballast operations in Part II, recorded under Regulation 17, with the entries cross-checked at port-state-control inspection against the ship’s position and the equipment logs.

The reception-facility precondition

The reason three Annex I Special Areas sit dormant is the reception-facility precondition. The convention does not let a Special Area’s discharge prohibition take effect simply because the resolution was adopted. The prohibition takes effect only from a later date, set after the governments of all the states bordering the Special Area have notified IMO that adequate reception facilities are provided for receiving the oily wastes and residues that ships can no longer discharge. The logic is plain: if a tanker may not discharge its slops at sea inside the area, there has to be somewhere ashore to land them. Prohibiting the discharge before the facilities exist would strand the waste on board with no lawful disposal route.

This is why the table carries three dates rather than two. Adoption fixes the resolution. Entry into force fixes the treaty obligation. The in-effect date, gated on the reception-facility notification, fixes the day the discharge prohibition actually governs ships. The Gulfs area and the Southern South African waters both crossed that threshold on 1 August 2008. The North West European Waters crossed it on 1 August 1999, six months after the text entered into force. The Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Oman area have not crossed it: their notifications are outstanding, so their stricter prohibitions are not yet operative and ships there remain under the general Regulation 34 cargo regime. A surveyor citing the Red Sea Special Area prohibition against a tanker today would be citing a rule that has not taken effect.

The precondition does not relax the rest of Annex I. A tanker in the Red Sea still has to meet the general 50-nautical-mile, 30-litres-per-nautical-mile, 1/30,000 cargo-discharge conditions; it just is not under the stricter Special Area prohibition. The reception-facility gate affects only the Special Area uplift, not the baseline regime.

The reason the precondition is structural rather than a procedural formality lies in what a Special Area asks of a ship. Outside the area a tanker can hold residue, meter a lawful en-route discharge, and arrive in port with empty slop tanks. Inside an operative Special Area it must retain every drop of cargo-area oil for the whole transit and land it ashore. A laden Aframax on a two-day Mediterranean passage can accumulate cargo-tank washings and line drainings that have to go somewhere, and the only lawful somewhere inside the area is a port reception facility. If the bordering states have not built and notified those facilities, the prohibition would force the ship to choose between an unlawful discharge and an indefinite hold with no disposal route. The convention resolves that by withholding the prohibition until the shore side is ready. The Gulfs area sat in force as text from 1983 but only took effect in 2008, a 25-year gap, precisely because the facility build-out across the bordering states took that long to complete and notify.

The notification is a joint act. All the states bordering a Special Area have to notify, not just one, because a tanker transiting the area may call at a port in any of them, and a single state’s facility does not discharge the obligation. This is why areas bordered by many states with uneven port infrastructure, the Red Sea among them, have lagged: the slowest bordering state sets the pace. The in-effect date is the date IMO records the last necessary notification, not the date the first facility opened.

Special Area, Emission Control Area, and PSSA: three different instruments

Three IMO geographic designations overlap on the chart and get conflated, but they rest on different regulations and control different things.

A MARPOL Annex I Special Area controls the discharge of oil into the water. Its authority is Regulation 1, Regulation 15 and Regulation 34 of Annex I, and its effect is to prohibit or tighten oil discharge. The ten areas in this article are Annex I Special Areas. Annex II (noxious liquid substances), Annex IV (sewage) and Annex V (garbage) each have their own separate lists of Special Areas, defined and dated independently.

An Emission Control Area under MARPOL Annex VI controls emissions into the air, not discharges into the water. The Baltic and the Mediterranean are both an Annex I Special Area and an Annex VI ECA, yet a ship complies with the two through entirely different means: holding its oily slops for the Special Area, and burning compliant low-sulphur fuel for the ECA. The full ECA list and compliance mechanics are in Emission Control Areas.

A Particularly Sensitive Sea Area is a different mechanism again. A PSSA is an area that IMO recognizes as needing special protection because of its ecological, socio-economic or scientific significance and its vulnerability to damage by shipping. A PSSA designation is not itself a discharge rule; it is a label that justifies one or more Associated Protective Measures, which can include mandatory ship routeing, areas to be avoided, compulsory pilotage, or a discharge restriction adopted under a MARPOL annex. A PSSA can therefore sit on top of a Special Area or an ECA, or it can stand alone with routeing measures and no discharge uplift. The Galapagos, the Great Barrier Reef and the Wadden Sea are PSSAs; none of them is an Annex I oil Special Area. The practical distinction: a Special Area answers “may I discharge oil here,” an ECA answers “what fuel may I burn here,” and a PSSA answers “how and where may I navigate here, and what extra protection applies.”

Operational compliance and port-state control

A ship crossing into a Special Area changes its discharge behavior at the boundary, and the change has to be planned, executed, and recorded. The engineer responsible for bilge management cannot discharge processed water inside the Antarctic at all, and inside the other operative areas can do so only with the 15 ppm equipment and any required monitoring running and the ship en route. The cargo officer on a tanker cannot conduct any cargo-area oil discharge inside an operative Special Area and has to plan slop retention and shore disposal around the transit. Both write the operations into the Oil Record Book with the time, position, quantity and equipment, and both entries become evidence at the next inspection.

Port-state-control inspectors treat the Oil Record Book and the oily-water-separator as priority items precisely because Special Area transits create a paper trail. An Oil Record Book showing a machinery-space discharge with a position inside an operative Special Area, or a cargo-area discharge anywhere inside one, is a deficiency on its face. A sludge tank that is suspiciously empty after a Special Area transit, or separator records that do not match the engine-room oil consumption, point to an unrecorded discharge or a bypass arrangement. The detainable end of this spectrum is the bypass line, the so-called magic pipe, which routes bilge water around the separator: detection in a Special Area context compounds the offense because the discharge was prohibited, not merely uncontrolled. The recording discipline under Regulation 17 and the equipment performance under Regulation 15 are the two things an inspector checks first when a vessel’s track crosses a Special Area boundary.

The boundary itself has to be known to the watch. Special Area limits are defined by coordinates or rhumb lines in the annex text and are reproduced on charts and ECDIS, but the in-effect status is not on the chart: a navigator looking at the Red Sea sees the area outline without any indication that its prohibition has not taken effect. The ship’s compliance documentation, not the chart, is where the operative-versus-dormant distinction has to be captured, which is one more reason the three-date table matters operationally and not just historically.

Slop retention drives the voyage plan on a tanker working an operative Special Area. The cargo officer has to know before entry how much slop the transit will generate, whether the slop tanks have the capacity to hold it alongside any retained-on-board cargo, and where the next reception facility with the right capacity sits on the route. A mismatch surfaces late and badly: a tanker that fills its slop tanks mid-transit with no lawful discharge option and no scheduled facility call has engineered itself into a corner. The planning is the same discipline that governs sludge from the machinery space, where the Regulation 12 oil residue tanks have to be sized for the longest plausible interval between facilities, but in a Special Area the interval is set by the area boundary rather than by the port-call schedule.

Enforcement intensity varies sharply across the ten areas, and not in proportion to their formal status. The Mediterranean, the Baltic and the North West European Waters sit inside the Paris Memorandum port-state-control region, where inspection rates are high, the Oil Record Book is a standing target, and a discharge deficiency carries real detention risk. The bordering states there also run their own coastal surveillance, including aerial and satellite oil-slick detection that can tie a slick to a passing ship’s track. The Gulfs area and the Southern South African waters are operative but sit under lighter inspection regimes. The three dormant areas attract no Special Area enforcement at all because there is no Special Area prohibition to enforce, only the general regime. A crew’s real compliance exposure therefore tracks the enforcement environment as much as the regulation: the same unrecorded discharge that might pass unnoticed in a lightly patrolled area is a detention and a criminal referral in the North Sea.

Limitations and practitioner notes

This article states the Special Area concept and the ten Annex I areas at the level of the consolidated annex and the IMO Special Areas table. It is not a substitute for the regulation text, the area’s exact boundary coordinates, or the ship-specific Oil Record Book and IOPP Supplement. The boundary of each area is fixed by precise coordinates and rhumb lines in the annex that this article summarizes in words; before applying a limit operationally, read the coordinates in the regulation, not the prose description here.

The in-effect status is the trap. Three areas, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Oman area of the Arabian Sea, are adopted and in force as treaty text but their stricter requirements have not taken effect because the reception-facility notifications are outstanding. Citing the Special Area prohibition against a ship in those waters is wrong: the general Regulation 34 cargo regime applies, not the Special Area prohibition. The in-effect column, not the in-force column, governs onboard compliance, and the in-effect status can change if a bordering state lodges its notification, so verify the current status against the IMO Special Areas table before relying on it in a deficiency, a charter dispute, or a class submission.

The discharge numbers do not cross between streams. The 15 ppm cap is a machinery-space concentration limit under Regulation 15; the 30 litres per nautical mile, the 1/30,000 or 1/15,000 voyage total, and the 50 nautical mile distance are cargo-area limits under Regulation 34 for oil tankers. A frequent onboard error mixes the two, applying a distance allowance to bilge water or a concentration cap to cargo slops. Inside an operative Special Area the cargo-area discharge is prohibited entirely, so the cargo numbers do not apply there at all; they describe only the outside-the-area regime.

The annex-by-annex split is real. The ten areas here are Annex I oil Special Areas. The Annex II, Annex IV and Annex V Special Area lists are separate, with their own areas, dates and in-effect triggers; the Antarctic appears on several of them but the Baltic Annex IV sewage area, for instance, is a different designation with a different date from the Baltic Annex I oil area. Do not read an Annex I in-effect date as governing garbage or sewage discharge.

The numbering follows the revised Annex I adopted by MEPC.117(52), in force 1 January 2007. Older sources cite pre-2007 numbering in which the discharge controls sat under different regulation numbers, and the two do not map one-to-one. The companion-calculator pairing for the cargo-discharge arithmetic, where one exists, is the Regulation 34 oil-discharge tool; the machinery-space 15 ppm check is the separator-sizing and alarm-threshold tooling referenced from Regulation 15. This overview is not a calculator and does not itself compute a limit.

See also

• MARPOL Annex I: prevention of pollution by oil parent annex
• MARPOL Annex I Regulation 15: oil discharge criteria machinery-space discharge control
• MARPOL Annex I Regulation 17: Oil Record Book recording obligation
• MARPOL Annex I Regulation 12A: oil fuel tank protection structural protection relevant in polar waters
• Antarctic special area and Polar Code regime the south-of-60S area in detail
• Emission Control Areas the Annex VI air-emission counterpart
• PSSA overview the protective-area designation
• MARPOL Annex V: garbage from ships garbage Special Areas
• MARPOL Annex IV: sewage from ships sewage Special Areas
• MARPOL Convention the parent treaty
• Port state control the enforcement mechanism
• Oil tanker the vessel type under the Regulation 34 cargo regime

References

1. IMO. Special Areas under MARPOL (Annex I, II, IV, V and VI table with adoption, entry-into-force and in-effect dates). IMO, London.
2. IMO. International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), 1973, as modified by the 1978 and 1997 Protocols, as amended, Annex I, Regulations 1, 15 and 34.
3. IMO Resolution MEPC.117(52) (2004), Adoption of the revised MARPOL Annex I, in force 1 January 2007.
4. IMO Resolution MEPC.42(30) (1990), Designation of the Antarctic area as a special area under Annexes I and V of MARPOL 73/78.