MARPOL 73/78 is a combination of two treaties adopted in 1973 and 1978 respectively and updated by amendments through the years. The Convention includes regulations aimed at preventing and minimising pollution from ships, both accidental pollution and from routine operations. The treaty covers six types of pollutant addressed under separate Annexes; I (oil), II (chemicals), III (packages substances), IV (sewage), V (garbage) and VI (stack emissions). With reference to the violation threshold for discharges set out in the Annexes, only oil spills can realistically be detected from space with sufficient confidence to consider their use in regulatory pollution surveillance operations.

Individual countries, using appropriate legal instruments they have in place, undertake enforcement of MARPOL 73/78. National enforcement generally operates within the supporting framework of a Regional Sea Treaty engaging agreement with other countries to establish a regional strategy towards pollution treaty compliance.

In the case of the North Sea, the Bonn Agreement provides a nine- nation framework for oil pollution surveillance and illegal spill detection and other similar regional treaties apply to the protection of the Baltic, Black Sea and Mediterranean.

The TESEO-MARPOL project, which extended through to 2003, involved the analysis of the interleaving regional treaties and agreements that embrace MARPOL 73/78 and the mechanisms for enforcement and prosecution that regional countries have in place. The object was to identify the potential role for EO and how this might be incorporated by way of decision support systems and information products into the MARPOL enforcement mechanism. The project identified regulatory user groups and associated decision support systems that integrate EO as important elements of the information delivery chain. In common with the methods underpinning existing family of integrated marine information systems, a philosophy of knowledge creation, adding value to available fragmented data, has been adopted. A decision support system concept has been proposed that accommodates EO as one of a number of data inputs in a knowledge delivery chain designed to address MARPOL regulatory needs. A special feature is the transformation of the satellite oil spill image information into a special data object and the use of so-called forensic algorithms to enable one to synthesise the past history and eventual fate of the spill.

The project allowed to explore a number of innovative approaches for the integration of EO and to put in place a selected pilot demonstrator appropriate to regulatory user needs.