EU actions tackling sea pollution by ships : not yet out of troubled waters; Special report 06, 2025

The EU's ambition is zero water pollution by 2030. In view of this, we assessed EU actions to address ship-source seawater pollution. Overall, EU rules improved, but implementation weaknesses existed and data was insufficient to measure results. While the European Maritime Safety Agency developed useful tools, member states did not use them to their full potential. They often failed to meet their mandatory targets for ship inspections. There was no overview of the results achieved by EU-funded projects or of the options for scaling up. Lastly, the monitoring of ship-source pollution was not adequate. Our recommendations aim to make pollution alert tools more effective, strengthen the monitoring of ship inspection targets, improve the impact of EU funding, and better measure seawater pollution.