The Jomard Entrance Particularly Sensitive Sea Area is the PSSA designated by the International Maritime Organization through Resolution MEPC.283(70), adopted at the 70th session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee on 28 October 2016. It covers the Jomard Entrance, the main deep-water gap through the Louisiade Archipelago at the south-eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, in Milne Bay Province, where the shipping route between eastern Australia and East Asia passes from the Coral Sea into the Solomon Sea. The single associated protective measure is a ships’ routeing system: four two-way routes and a precautionary area, adopted by IMO under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 10 and in force since 1 June 2015, more than a year before the PSSA resolution itself. The routes are recommendatory tracks that separate north-bound and south-bound traffic and steer ships clear of the reefs that flank the entrance. They are not compulsory pilotage and not a mandatory ship reporting system, which is the central contrast with the Torres Strait PSSA to the south-west. The proposal was made jointly by Papua New Guinea’s National Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, and it rests on the reefs of the Coral Triangle, some of the world’s largest remaining populations of three marine turtle species, the reliance of Louisiade Islander communities on reef fisheries, and the remoteness of the archipelago, which leaves little local capacity to respond to a spill. The PSSA framework and the discharge regime overlay the MARPOL Convention annexes that apply to any ship transiting these waters.
What the Jomard Entrance PSSA is, and what it is not
A Particularly Sensitive Sea Area is an area that IMO recognizes as needing special protection because of its ecological, socio-economic or scientific significance and its vulnerability to damage from international shipping; the PSSA framework under Assembly Resolution A.982(24) is set out in full in the overview article. The key point for the Jomard Entrance is the same one that governs every PSSA: the designation by itself creates no new enforcement power and no no-go zone. The protection comes entirely from the associated protective measures (APMs), and each APM must be a measure IMO already has the competence to adopt, here a ships’ routeing system under SOLAS Chapter V.
The Jomard Entrance is a clean example of a PSSA built on a single routeing APM. The 2016 resolution did not invent a new legal category or impose a new duty on ships in transit. It recorded that the entrance met the PSSA criteria and confirmed an already-operating routeing system as the protective measure associated with the area. That sequence matters: the four two-way routes and the precautionary area were adopted by IMO and entered force on 1 June 2015, and the PSSA designation followed on 28 October 2016. The protective hardware was already on the chart before the umbrella was raised over it.
There is a distinction worth drawing out at the start, because it shapes the rest of the article. A PSSA is not the same as a MARPOL Special Area. A Special Area is a discharge-control designation under one or more MARPOL annexes; a PSSA is a routeing, reporting and protection regime that can include discharge controls but does not have to. The Jomard Entrance PSSA carries no Special Area discharge designation of its own. The general MARPOL discharge rules apply, the same rules that apply on the adjacent Coral Sea, and the PSSA adds the routeing structure on top. A vessel in the entrance satisfies the global MARPOL discharge regime and follows the recommendatory routes; it does not face a stricter Special Area discharge standard inside the PSSA boundary.
The second distinction is between this PSSA and the various conservation designations that overlap the wider region. The reefs of the Louisiade Archipelago sit within the Coral Triangle and are part of Papua New Guinea’s national reef estate, and the turtle populations are of international conservation interest. Those values supported the PSSA case, but they are not themselves IMO instruments and they do not regulate a foreign ship in transit. Only the IMO routeing measure does that, and only as a recommendation.
Geography: the deep gap through the Louisiade Archipelago
The Jomard Entrance is the principal navigable break in the Louisiade Archipelago, the long chain of reefs, islands and atolls that trails south-east from the tip of mainland Papua New Guinea for roughly 200 nautical miles. The archipelago is administered as part of Milne Bay Province. The entrance lies near 11 degrees 20 minutes south and 152 degrees east, between the Jomard Islands to the north-west and the reefs and islets to the south-east, and it opens the gate between the Coral Sea to the south and the Solomon Sea to the north.
The trade geography is what makes the entrance matter. A ship sailing between eastern Australian ports and East Asia, or between the Coral Sea and the western Pacific, has a choice of gaps through the reef chain, but the Jomard Entrance is the widest and the deepest of the practicable ones and the one the preferred charted route runs through. The IMO routeing system is aligned with, and centered on, that existing preferred route. About 27 large commercial ships transit the entrance on an average day, so this is a working artery, not a lightly used corner of the ocean.
The depth profile is the single most important physical fact about the entrance and the one that separates it from the Torres Strait to the south-west. At the shoalest point within the routeing system the charted depth is in excess of 200 meters. A deep-draft bulk carrier or tanker therefore transits with hundreds of meters of water under the keel. Squat, tide and under-keel clearance, the constraints that dominate a Torres Strait passage, are not the controlling factors here. The risk at the Jomard Entrance is not that a ship runs out of water beneath it; it is that a ship runs into a reef beside it, or collides with opposing traffic in the converging stream of vessels funneling through the gap.
That risk profile is why the protective measure is a routeing system rather than a pilotage or under-keel-clearance regime. The reefs and islets bound the entrance on both sides, and the daily traffic of around 27 large ships converges from several directions before threading the gap. Before the routeing system, north-bound and south-bound ships shared the same water without a managed separation, and a risk assessment commissioned for the proposal found that introducing two-way routes would cut the risk of collision and of reef contact. The geometry, dense converging traffic through a defined gap between reefs, is a routeing problem, and IMO routeing under SOLAS V/10 is the standard tool for it.
The vulnerability case: Coral Triangle reefs, turtles and remote communities
The ecological case for the Jomard Entrance rests on the reefs of the Coral Triangle, the region spanning the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands that holds the highest marine biodiversity on Earth. The Louisiade Archipelago lies within that triangle, and its reefs carry the coral, fish and invertebrate diversity characteristic of the region’s center of richness. A grounding on one of these reefs does the same physical damage seen on any tropical reef: crushed coral heads, antifoulant and fuel contamination, and a scar that takes years to recolonize. The reefs are also poorly surveyed compared with the heavily charted Great Barrier Reef to the south-west, which adds uncertainty for any vessel that strays from the preferred track.
The turtle case is concrete. The waters around the Jomard Entrance hold some of the largest remaining populations of three marine turtle species, and the proposal documented the archipelago’s role as nesting and foraging habitat for them. Turtles are slow to mature and slow to breed, so a population that nests on a small set of islands is acutely exposed to a single major spill on the nesting beaches or the foraging reefs. The same vulnerability that the Torres Strait extension cited for the green turtle and the dugong applies here for the turtle populations of the Louisiade chain.
The social and cultural criteria carry real weight in this designation. The Louisiade Archipelago is inhabited, and the Islander communities depend on the reefs and the inshore fishery for subsistence and for their traditional economy. A chronic decline in reef health, or an acute spill, would damage that economy directly. The cultural-heritage and socio-economic criterion families of A.982(24) were demonstrated through that dependence, in the same way the Torres Strait case rested on the traditional reliance of the Torres Strait Islander peoples on dugong, turtle and reef fisheries.
The remoteness criterion is the one that ties the case together. The Louisiade Archipelago is far from any major port or salvage base. There is little local spill-response capacity, no nearby deep-water salvage tug on permanent station, and a long steaming time for any response asset from the Australian or Papua New Guinean mainland. A casualty in the entrance would have hours, not minutes, of effective local response, and the prevailing trade winds and currents would set spilled oil onto the reefs and islands before outside help arrived. The proposing states framed the remoteness and the limited response capacity as a multiplier on the consequence of any casualty, which is the standard way the vulnerability limb of A.982(24) is argued for an isolated reef system.
From a 2015 routeing system to a 2016 PSSA: the designation history
The protective measure came first. Papua New Guinea’s National Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority developed a joint proposal for a ships’ routeing system at the Jomard Entrance and submitted it to IMO through the navigation work stream. IMO’s navigation sub-committee considered the proposal, the Maritime Safety Committee adopted the routeing system, and the four two-way routes and the precautionary area entered into force on 1 June 2015. The system was promulgated through the IMO Ships’ Routeing publication and reproduced on the Australian and Papua New Guinean navigation charts and on the electronic chart cells used through ECDIS.
The PSSA designation followed. The two states submitted the PSSA case to the Marine Environment Protection Committee, documenting the Coral Triangle reefs, the turtle populations, the Islander reliance on reef fisheries, and the remoteness and limited response capacity, against the vulnerability of all of those to the daily traffic of around 27 large ships. MEPC considered the proposal and adopted it at its 70th session as Resolution MEPC.283(70) on 28 October 2016, designating the Jomard Entrance as a PSSA and recognizing the already-operating routeing system as its associated protective measure.
It is worth being precise about the relationship between the two instruments, because it is easy to misstate. The routeing system is a SOLAS Chapter V measure adopted by the Maritime Safety Committee; the PSSA designation is a marine-environment measure adopted by MEPC. The PSSA resolution did not create the routes, change them, or make them mandatory. It associated the existing routeing system with the newly designated sensitive area. This is the standard IMO architecture for a PSSA whose APM is a routeing measure: the routeing is adopted under SOLAS V/10 by the MSC side of the house, and the area is designated under the PSSA guidelines by the MEPC side, with the two referring to each other.
A note on the resolution number is in order, because secondary sources get it wrong. The designating instrument is Resolution MEPC.283(70), adopted 28 October 2016. It is not MEPC.282(70) and not MEPC.284(70); those numbers belong to other items adopted at the same session. A practitioner citing the Jomard Entrance PSSA should pin the citation to MEPC.283(70) and to the 28 October 2016 date, both of which appear on the face of the IMO resolution.
The associated protective measure: four two-way routes and a precautionary area
The protective package associated with the Jomard Entrance PSSA is a single ships’ routeing system, adopted under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 10, with two elements: four two-way routes and a precautionary area. The routes and the precautionary area are recommendatory, which is the defining legal feature of this PSSA and the point that separates it cleanly from the compulsory regime in the Torres Strait.
A two-way route, in IMO routeing terms, is a defined track within defined limits inside which two-way traffic is established, intended to improve safety in waters where navigation is difficult or where a converging traffic pattern needs to be ordered. At the Jomard Entrance the four two-way routes channel the converging streams of north-bound and south-bound traffic onto managed tracks aligned with the existing preferred route, so that opposing ships meet in a predictable geometry rather than crossing each other in open water between the reefs. The routes keep ships in the deep water of the entrance and well clear of the reefs and islets on either flank.
A precautionary area is a routeing measure of defined extent where ships must navigate with particular caution and within which the direction of traffic flow may be recommended. The precautionary area at the Jomard Entrance sits at the point where the two-way routes converge, the natural choke point where ships from different approaches funnel into the gap. Inside it a master is expected to keep a heightened lookout, reduce to a safe and manageable speed for the converging traffic, and be ready to give way under the collision-avoidance rules. The precautionary area is the routeing system’s answer to the converging-traffic risk that a simple set of parallel routes would not fully resolve.
The recommendatory character runs through both elements. A recommendatory two-way route is one that IMO recommends ships use; it is not a mandatory route and not a traffic separation scheme made compulsory by a flag-state’s law. The distinction matters for enforcement and for the law of the sea. Because the measure is recommendatory, it does not condition the right of passage on any compulsory act, and it raises none of the transit-passage objections that the compulsory pilotage in the Torres Strait raised under UNCLOS Part III. The objecting flag states that contest compulsory pilotage in an international strait have no equivalent objection to a recommendatory routeing measure, because following a recommendation is precisely what a recommendation contemplates.
SOLAS V/10 and the legal mechanics of an IMO routeing measure
The protective measure at the Jomard Entrance lives entirely inside the IMO ships’ routeing framework, so it is worth setting out how that framework works and what it does and does not bind. Routeing measures are adopted under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 10, which gives IMO the recognized role as the only international body for establishing and adopting routeing systems, and which obliges Contracting Governments to refer proposals for adoption to IMO. The detail of the categories of routeing measure, traffic separation schemes, two-way routes, recommended routes, deep-water routes, precautionary areas, areas to be avoided and the rest, sits in the IMO General Provisions on Ships’ Routeing, which the Jomard Entrance system follows in form and definition.
The adoption path ran through the navigation work stream. A proposing government, here Papua New Guinea with Australia, submits the routeing proposal with its supporting risk assessment; the navigation sub-committee reviews the technical case; and the Maritime Safety Committee adopts the measure. Once adopted, the system is promulgated in the IMO Ships’ Routeing publication and carried onto national charts and electronic chart cells, and it takes effect on a stated date, here 1 June 2015. The PSSA designation under MEPC.283(70) sits on top of that adopted routeing system; it does not re-adopt the routes or alter their legal character.
The binding effect of a recommendatory routeing measure is real but indirect. SOLAS V/10 does not itself make every recommendatory route mandatory, and it expressly leaves the decision to make a particular system mandatory to IMO on a case-by-case basis. For the Jomard Entrance the system was adopted as recommendatory, so the obligation on the ship is the general SOLAS and COLREG duty to navigate prudently, informed by an IMO-recommended track that is on the chart in front of the watchkeeper. A flag state must require its ships to use adopted mandatory systems; for a recommendatory system the expectation is compliance as a matter of good seamanship, supported by the chart, the routeing publication and the passage plan. This is the same legal texture that lets the measure avoid the transit-passage controversy: a recommendation engages prudence, not compulsion.
The proposal: a risk assessment and a converging-traffic case
The joint proposal was built on a formal navigational risk assessment, which is the standard evidentiary spine of an IMO routeing submission. The assessment quantified the traffic, the converging-approach geometry and the reef hazard, and tested whether two-way routes would lower the risk. Its finding was direct: introducing two-way routes at the Jomard Entrance would reduce the risk of collision and would keep ships clear of the reefs, separating the north-bound and south-bound streams that had previously shared the same water without managed separation. That finding is what justified a routeing measure rather than a heavier intervention, and it is what the PSSA proposal later pointed to as the protective benefit the designation secured.
The traffic figure carries the case. An average of about 27 large commercial ships transit the entrance each day, which over a year is on the order of ten thousand transits of large vessels through a single deep-water gap bounded by reefs. At that density, meeting and crossing situations are not occasional events to be managed ad hoc; they are the normal condition of the passage. A converging-traffic pattern at that volume, through poorly charted reef country, is exactly the setting the IMO routeing categories were designed for, and the two-way-route-plus-precautionary-area combination is the textbook response to it.
The joint authorship reflects a shared trade interest. Papua New Guinea is the coastal state, so the National Maritime Safety Authority is the proposing flag and coastal authority, but the traffic through the entrance is dominated by ships on the eastern Australia to Asia and Coral Sea to western Pacific routes, which is why the Australian Maritime Safety Authority co-developed the proposal and the risk assessment. The two agencies already run the continuous pilotage and reporting service across the maritime boundary in the Torres Strait to the south-west, so the institutional cooperation that produced the Jomard Entrance routeing system and PSSA was an extension of an established working relationship, not a new arrangement.
How the routes are used in practice
For the watchkeeper, the Jomard Entrance reduces to a routeing-and-lookout problem rather than a depth problem. The passage plan threads the recommendatory two-way routes, holding the ship in the deep center of the entrance with the reefs kept at a safe distance on either side, and treats the precautionary area as the segment demanding the most attention. Because the shoalest charted depth in the routeing system exceeds 200 meters, the planner does not pin the transit to a tidal window the way a Torres Strait or Prince of Wales Channel transit must be pinned. There is no under-keel-clearance arithmetic of consequence here, no squat allowance to schedule around, and no waiting on the tide.
The controlling risk is traffic. With around 27 large commercial ships transiting on an average day, and with ships converging on the entrance from several approaches, meeting and crossing situations are routine. The two-way routes order the flow so that opposing traffic meets on managed tracks, and the precautionary area concentrates the caution at the choke point where the streams come together. The geometry of a meeting or crossing inside the routes is the standard problem of the collision regulations: a vessel works the closest-point-of-approach and time-to-closest-approach to keep a safe passing distance, the same calculation supported by the CPA/TCPA calculator, and applies the give-way and stand-on obligations as it would on any busy route.
The second risk is the reef itself. The track is bounded by reef and islet, and the charting of the archipelago is less complete than the heavily surveyed Great Barrier Reef to the south-west, so a vessel that strays from the recommendatory route, loses steerage, or suffers a steering or engine failure has reef close at hand. The routes are positioned to keep the ship in the surveyed deep water; the discipline of staying on them is the practical safety control, in the same way that staying on a traffic-separation lane is the control in any reef-bounded passage. For the broader voyage decision, a master who would otherwise route through the entrance can compare it against alternative gaps in the reef chain or the longer diversion, a routeing trade-off of the kind quantified by the great-circle versus rhumb-line distance comparison.
The discharge rules apply throughout. Inside the PSSA boundary the general MARPOL Annex I oil-discharge prohibitions apply with the rigor expected near a sensitive reef, backed by the shipboard oil pollution emergency plan required under Regulation 37 SOPEP, and the garbage and sewage rules of Annex V and Annex IV apply at the global default. There is no Emission Control Area in these waters and no regional ECA; air emissions are governed by the global regime of MARPOL Annex VI.
Why recommendatory routeing, and not pilotage or a reporting system
The choice of a recommendatory routeing measure, rather than the compulsory pilotage and mandatory reporting used in the Torres Strait, follows directly from the physical setting and from the law of the sea. Three factors drive it.
The first is depth. The Torres Strait’s compulsory pilotage is defensible in part because the strait is so shallow and constrained that a deep-draft transit without local knowledge of the channel, the reefs and the tidal streams is a genuine hazard. The Jomard Entrance has hundreds of meters of water, so the case for a pilot conning the ship through a shallow, squat-dominated channel does not arise. The hazard is converging traffic and reef proximity, which routeing addresses directly without putting a pilot on the bridge of every ship.
The second is the legal setting. The Jomard Entrance carries heavy international traffic, and a strong, compulsory measure on transit traffic would invite the same transit-passage objections under UNCLOS Part III that the Torres Strait compulsory pilotage attracted from the United States and Singapore. A recommendatory routeing system sidesteps that argument entirely. IMO routeing under SOLAS V/10 is well established and uncontroversial, and a recommendation does not condition the right of passage. The proposing states chose a measure that delivers the safety benefit without opening the legal dispute.
The third is proportionality to the documented risk. The risk assessment behind the proposal found that two-way routes would cut the risk of collision and reef contact at the entrance. That finding supports a routeing measure; it does not, by itself, support the much heavier intervention of compulsory pilotage on every transiting ship. The PSSA guidelines require the APM to be the measure adequate to the documented risk and within IMO’s competence, and a recommendatory routeing system is the measure that fits the Jomard Entrance risk. The result is a PSSA whose protective measure is light, recommendatory and uncontested, which is a deliberate design choice and not a weakness.
Relationship to the Torres Strait and Great Barrier Reef PSSAs
The Jomard Entrance, the Torres Strait and the Great Barrier Reef sit on the same regional reef system and on the same broad trade lanes, and reading them together shows how IMO matches the protective measure to the setting. The Great Barrier Reef PSSA, designated by Resolution MEPC.44(30) on 16 November 1990, was the world’s first PSSA and gave compulsory pilotage to the Reef Inner Route. The Torres Strait PSSA, an extension of the Reef PSSA designated by Resolution MEPC.133(53) on 22 July 2005, carried compulsory pilotage and a mandatory ship reporting system north through the narrow strait. The Jomard Entrance PSSA, designated by Resolution MEPC.283(70) on 28 October 2016, added a recommendatory routeing system at the eastern feeder approach.
Geographically the three form a sequence along the route between eastern Australia and Asia. A deep-draft ship leaving a Queensland terminal for East Asia runs north inside the Great Barrier Reef, threads the Torres Strait under pilotage, and then has the option of the Jomard Entrance as it crosses from the Coral Sea toward the Solomon Sea and the western Pacific. The Jomard Entrance is, in that sense, an eastern gateway that complements the Torres Strait route: it serves the traffic crossing between the Coral Sea and the Solomon Sea and the ships routing to and from the western Pacific, while the Torres Strait serves the route through to the Arafura Sea and beyond.
The contrast in protective measures is the lesson. The Torres Strait is shallow, narrow and reef-strewn, so it carries compulsory pilotage and mandatory reporting, and that compulsion is what makes it the standing test case for how far a PSSA can reach over transit traffic in an international strait. The Jomard Entrance is deep and wide enough that the risk is traffic and reef proximity rather than draft, so it carries a recommendatory routeing system and raises none of the transit-passage controversy. Same regional ecosystem, same trade lane, different physical constraint, different measure. The two PSSAs are not duplicative; they protect the two ends of the eastern approach with the tool each setting calls for.
There is also a difference in administration. The Torres Strait PSSA is bilateral in the fullest sense, an extension of an Australian-led designation given compulsory effect under both Australian and Papua New Guinean law and operated as a continuous pilotage and reporting service across the maritime boundary. The Jomard Entrance lies in Papua New Guinean waters, and the PSSA was proposed jointly by Papua New Guinea’s National Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, with the two agencies bringing a single risk assessment and a single routeing proposal to IMO. The joint proposal reflects the shared interest in the route: both states’ trades funnel through this corner of the Coral and Solomon Seas, and the protective measure benefits both.
Regional reef context and the limits of a routeing PSSA
The Jomard Entrance PSSA protects a small, defined gap, and its boundary is drawn around the entrance and the routeing system rather than around the whole Louisiade Archipelago. That focus is deliberate. The PSSA targets the navigational risk at the point where international shipping concentrates, the converging deep-water gap, and leaves the broader conservation of the archipelago’s reefs and turtle populations to Papua New Guinean domestic law and to the regional Coral Triangle conservation effort. The IMO measure is the shipping-risk component of a wider conservation picture, not the whole of it.
The wider Coral Triangle context frames the designation. The triangle is the global center of coral and reef-fish diversity, and the six Coral Triangle states cooperate on its conservation through a regional initiative that addresses fisheries, climate adaptation and marine protected areas. The Jomard Entrance PSSA is the maritime-shipping piece of that picture for the Louisiade reefs: it manages the one risk vector, the daily transit traffic, that an inshore-fisheries or protected-area regime cannot reach, because foreign ships in transit are regulated through IMO, not through a coastal state’s domestic conservation law alone.
The casualty record in the region underlines why the routeing system matters. Groundings on poorly charted reefs in remote tropical waters tend to be slow to respond to and severe in consequence, because the response assets are far away and the prevailing winds and currents set spilled oil onto the reefs before help arrives. The Jomard Entrance has not been the site of a major post-designation casualty, which is the outcome the routeing system is designed to maintain. The measure works by keeping ships in the deep, surveyed water and ordering the converging traffic, so that the casualty that would test the remote response capacity does not happen in the first place.
The trade pattern reinforces the design. The traffic through the entrance is dominated by deep-draft commercial ships on the eastern Australia to Asia and Coral Sea to western Pacific routes, the same general trades that feed the Torres Strait route to the west. For those ships the entrance is the convenient deep gap through the reef chain, and the alternative is a longer diversion to another gap or around the archipelago. The recommendatory routeing system lets that traffic keep using the convenient route while ordering it for safety, which is the practical reason a recommendatory measure, rather than an area-to-be-avoided that would exclude the traffic, was the right design for a busy international approach.
Enforcement, limitations and practitioner notes
The Jomard Entrance PSSA shows where the reach of a recommendatory PSSA stops, and the limits are different from those of a compulsory regime. The designation creates no no-go area and no new enforcement power. The routeing system is recommendatory, so a ship that does not follow the two-way routes is not, by that fact alone, committing an enforceable offence in the way that a ship ignoring a mandatory ship reporting system or a compulsory pilotage requirement would be. The practical force of the measure comes from good seamanship, from the routes being the safe and charted track, and from the flag state’s general obligation to have its ships navigate prudently, rather than from a coastal-state power to detain or fine a non-complying transit.
Several practitioner-grade caveats follow. First, recommendatory does not mean optional in any practical sense for a prudent master. The routes are positioned in the surveyed deep water and away from the reefs; departing from them in a converging-traffic gap between poorly charted reefs is a navigational decision a master would have to justify, and a casualty after an unjustified departure would weigh heavily in any liability or class inquiry. Treat the recommendatory route as the default track and deviate only for sound, documented navigational reasons.
Second, the absence of a depth constraint can lull a planner. Because there is no under-keel-clearance issue, the temptation is to treat the entrance as open water. The real risk is the converging traffic and the reef proximity, so the passage plan should front-load the traffic picture and the precautionary-area handling, not the depth. A meeting situation in the precautionary area leaves limited room to open the passing distance, and the timing of meetings is best anticipated well before the ships are in sight, using AIS and the CPA/TCPA geometry.
Third, the citation must be precise. The designating resolution is MEPC.283(70) of 28 October 2016, and the routeing system entered force on 1 June 2015 under SOLAS V/10. Mis-citing the resolution number, a common error in secondary sources that confuse it with the adjacent MEPC.282(70) or MEPC.284(70), undermines a compliance reference. The routeing system and the PSSA are two instruments adopted by two committees; cite the routeing system to the Maritime Safety Committee and SOLAS V/10, and the PSSA to MEPC.283(70).
Fourth, the discharge regime is the global MARPOL default, not a Special Area standard. A garbage or sewage discharge that would be lawful on the open Coral Sea is, in the absence of a Special Area designation here, lawful inside the Jomard Entrance PSSA boundary under the same global rules, subject to the general prohibitions and to the heightened prudence any master should exercise near a sensitive reef. Do not assume a stricter Special Area discharge standard that the designation does not impose. The PSSA’s protection is the routeing measure, not a discharge tightening.
The broader limit is the one the comparison with the Torres Strait makes plain. A recommendatory routeing PSSA delivers its safety benefit without controversy precisely because it asks less of the transiting ship than a compulsory regime does. It orders the traffic and keeps ships clear of the reefs, and the evidence is that it reduces the risk of collision and reef contact. What it does not do, and is not meant to do, is exclude traffic, compel a pilot, or force a report. For a busy deep-water international approach in remote waters, that lighter measure is the proportionate one, and the Jomard Entrance stands as the worked example of a PSSA matched to a converging-traffic, deep-water reef gap rather than to a shallow, constrained strait.
See also
- Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas: overview
- Torres Strait PSSA
- Great Barrier Reef PSSA
- Galapagos PSSA
- Tubbataha Reefs PSSA
- SOLAS Chapter V: safety of navigation
- COLREG Convention
- UNCLOS overview for shipping
- MARPOL Annex I oil pollution prevention
- MARPOL Annex I Regulation 37 SOPEP
- CPA / TCPA calculator
- Great Circle vs Rhumb distance comparison
References
- International Maritime Organization, Resolution MEPC.283(70), Designation of the Jomard Entrance as a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area, adopted 28 October 2016.
- International Maritime Organization, Resolution A.982(24), Revised Guidelines for the Identification and Designation of Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas, adopted 1 December 2005, as amended by MEPC.267(68) of 15 May 2015.
- International Maritime Organization, report of the Marine Environment Protection Committee, 70th session, 24 to 28 October 2016.
- International Maritime Organization, ships’ routeing under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 10; Jomard Entrance routeing system (four two-way routes and a precautionary area) in force 1 June 2015.
- International Maritime Organization, Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas, official list and background.