**5. Ballast water in the Arctic region**

The Arctic Region is regulated by the Polar Code developed by the IMO [29]. According to the Polar Code, The Ballast Water Convention (BWM Convention, 2004) and its Regulations D-1, regarding ballast water exchange (a method that requires foreign ballast water carried on a ship to be exchanged with local water before the ship enters the region's marine environment), an exercise that may prove dangerous in adverse weather but accepted to be effective and an acceptable practice, and D-2, regarding ballast water performance standards, are methods currently considered to be appropriate for the Arctic region [30]. The fact that Polar Code so clearly encourages compliance with the treatment of Ballast Water in that region by providing as follows:

"4 **Additional Guidance Under Other Environmental Conventions And Guidelines** 4.1 Until the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments enters into force, the ballast water management provisions of the ballast water exchange standard, set out in regulation D-1, or the ballast water performance standard, set out in regulation D-2 of the Convention should be considered as appropriate. The provisions of the Guidelines for ballast water exchange in the Antarctic treaty area (resolution MEPC.163 (56)) should be taken into consideration along with other relevant guidelines developed by the Organization. 4.2 In selecting the ballast water management system, attention should be paid to limiting conditions specified in the appendix of the Type Approval Certificate and the temperature under which the system has been tested, in order to ensure its suitability and effectiveness in polar waters."

The Polar Code is a strong risk management and safety instrument mandated and applied together with the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) [31] IMO instrument as well as the environmental protection law in the form of The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (*MARPOL*) [32]. This means that ballast water laws must be effective in the Arctic to protect that region (**Figure 2**).

In a paper, simulating ballast mater movements and management in the Arctic region authors Rosenhaim et al. use a ballast water tracer as a pathway to highlight through their experiments that ballast water accumulation in the Arctic is strongly linked to seasonality, this essential data for environmental protection and planning. Through their experiments, the authors demonstrate that conditions linked to summer, winter, and autumn conditions affect ballast water accumulation in the region. Most importantly, the authors through experimentation show that there is a risk of contamination of the environment through ballast water accumulation [11]. Here is a ballast water management warning from the experiment of the authors in the Arctic:

"In winter, due to the small number of vessels navigating the Northeast Passage, the amount of ballast water tracer released in the model was small. Following the increase in the number of vessels towards spring and especially in summer, the amount of ballast water tracer increased, and thus the risk of environmental contamination (e.g., by nonindigenous species, anthropogenic contaminants, pathogens, and toxins) [11]."

**Figure 2.** *Extent of Arctic waters as per IMO polar code, source: (IMO, polar code, 2017).*

The authors above are telling us that when the Arctic waters open up more as a result of trade, ballast water methods on ships should be updated to comply with the BWM 2004 Convention, so that environmental contamination is a smaller risk for winter months (trades and voyages significantly shrink), or whether the contamination is more significant in the summer months, their tracer experiments should be able to (with the right ballast water technologies on board vessels trading in the Arctic) show that in general employing such technologies actually through the proof of data decreases contamination through ballast water. This is a powerful experiment to test for the success of ballast water management technologies.
