Monitoring vessel traffic in Rio de Janeiro port area: Control of marine antifouling regulations

Nowadays, we live in a global interdependence time, without precedents, in which the national boundaries do not represent significant barriers to the trade between nations anymore. According to the International Marine Organization (IMO), more than 90% of all the global commercial transport flows through sea. This heavy vessel traffic produces a lot of impact and changes in the marine environment. Each vessel of tonnage higher than 100t has a registration number on IMO that guarantees that the vessel is by the security, health and environment conventions of the Organization. The present study has a goal of developing a methodology to monitor the vessel movement in Rio de Janeiro port area, for verifying the presence of vessels non-signatories of the A928 convention (The International Convention on the Control of Harmful Antifouling Systems on Ships). The data were obtained from the Marine Traffic app, in the period between December of 2015 and October of 2017. Data such as registration number on IMO, homeport, dates, and registration flag was compiled for 3015 vessels. Those that were derived from non-signatories countries to the AFs Convention represented 3.78% of the total of monitored vessels. This percentage is lower than the global tonnage of the non-signatories countries, which is 6.45%. The proposed method is laborious but proved to be efficient to indicate the possibility of environmental issues related to marine traffic, even before a ship's arrival in the destination port.