Environmental assessment and management in the marine shipping industry.

摘要

This thesis explores a mechanism for the determination of environmental compliance on Canadian, Great Lakes merchant marine ships. It involves the development, application and evaluation of an environmental compliance audit.An environmental compliance audit was chosen as these audits are a recognized tool for assessing compliance. Upon completion of each audit of four ships, a determination of the degree of environmental compliance was made, then an overall consensus was established. The ships surveyed in this study complied with the applicable regulations and guidelines.The audit instrument and protocol were evaluated using comprehensiveness, relevance, workability and receptiveness as criteria. Critical questions and a rating system were used to substantiate each evaluation criterion. Data sources included: the Canada Shipping Act Canadian Coast Guard personnel and documents the ships' official record/log books interviews with the ships' personnel and a walk about. The ratings were synthesized and a general evaluation was rendered for each criterion. Then an overall evaluation judgement was then made based on the results of each criterion. The audit's strengths and weaknesses were then evident from these evaluative conclusions.The evaluations of the comprehensive, relevance and receptiveness criteria indicated the audit provided an informed judgement on the degree of environmental compliance. The workability was rated as moderate, due only to time restrictions.Overall, the rating of the audit instrument was favourable. Enough information can be collected to cover all environmental issues and provide enough information to make an accurate assessment regarding a ship's degree of environmental compliance.