Conflict between Environmental Performance and Human Safety

In recent years, International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the classification societies have issued a number of regulations and guidelines addressing both environmental performance and human safety of ships. All of these regulations and guidelines are aimed at building improved vessels, but environmental performance and human safety are usually considered separately. Sometimes, this results in the two issues conflicting with each other: a regulation that is intended to improve environmental performance may have negative effects on human safety and vice versa. The objective of this paper is to investigate the conflict and points towards the need for an integrated evaluation of both environmental performance and human safety of ships. As a basis, this paper provides several examples in which environmental performance and safety contradicts each other. Based on the examples, a conceptual description of the problem is provided, including suggestions for further work.