Questões Militares

IMO Action Plan to address marine plastic litter from ships

  IMO?s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) in 2018 adopted the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Action Plan to address marine plastic litter from ships, which aims to enhance existing regulations and introduce new supporting measures to reduce marine plastic litter from ships.

What is marine litter? 

  Plastic materials in all shapes and sizes are omnipresent in our seas and oceans. They break down extremely slowly in the marine environment, taking in excess of 400 years. Marine litter originates from many sources and causes a wide spectrum of environmental, economic, safety, health and cultural impacts. For example, marine litter can cause harm to sea life if ingested or even death if a marine mammal becomes entangled in litter.

  Marine litter has been defined by UN Environment (United Nations Environment) as “any persistent, manufactured or processed solid material discarded, disposed of or abandoned in the marine and coastal environment. Marine litter consists of items that have been made or used by people and deliberately discarded into the sea or rivers or on beaches; brought indirectly to the sea with rivers, sewage, storm water or winds; accidentally lost, including material lost at sea in bad weather (fishing gear, cargo); or deliberately left by people on beaches and shores.”

   Marine litter, including plastics and microplastics, is known to result from land-based sources in massive quantities but can also originate from ships. Debris particles have been observed in coastal areas, in waters far from anthropogenic pollution sources, in surface waters, in the water column of deep water and in ocean sediments, and from the equator to the poles, including trapped in sea ice.

  UN Environment estimates that 15% of marine litter floats on the sea's surface, 15% remains in the water column and 70% rests on the seabed.

  According to another study, 5.25 million plastic particles, weighing 268,940 tonnes in total, are currently floating in the world”s oceans.

What problems does marinelitter cause? 

  In addition to the environmental and health problems posed by marine litter, floating garbage and plastics pose a costly as well as dangerous problem for shipping, as they can be anavigational hazard and become entangled in propellers and rudders.

  Another problem requiring urgent remedial action is the massive accumulation of plastics, not only in coastal areas but also in the deep sea.

  This litter is harmful to marine life: sea creatures can become trapped inside containers or strangled by nets or ropes, and microplastics can also enter the food chain as they are indigestible when swallowed.

(Adapted from https://www.imo.org

How facial recognition technology aids police

Police officers’ ability to recognize and locate individuals with a history of committing crime is vital to their work. In fact, it is so important that officers believe possessing it is fundamental to the craft of effective street policing, crime prevention and investigation. However, with the total police workforce falling by almost 20 percent since 2010 and recorded crime rising, police forces are turning to new technological solutions to help enhance their capability and capacity to monitor and track individuals about whom they have concerns.

One such technology is Automated Facial Recognition (known as AFR). This works by analyzing key facial features, generating a mathematical representation of them, and then comparing them against known faces in a database, to determine possible matches. While a number of UK and international police forces have been enthusiastically exploring the potential of AFR, some groups have spoken about its legal and ethical status. They are concerned that the technology significantly extends the reach and depth of surveillance by the state.

Until now, however, there has been no robust evidence about what AFR systems can and cannot deliver for policing. Although AFR has become increasingly familiar to the public through its use at airports to help manage passport checks, the environment in such settings is quite controlled. Applying similar procedures to street policing is far more complex. Individuals on the street will be moving and may not look directly towards the camera. Levels of lighting change, too, and the system will have to cope with the vagaries of the British weather.

[…]

As with all innovative policing technologies there are important legal and ethical concerns and issues that still need to be considered. But in order for these to be meaningfully debated and assessed by citizens, regulators and law-makers, we need a detailed understanding of precisely what the technology can realistically accomplish. Sound evidence, rather than references to science fiction technology --- as seen in films such as Minority Report --- is essential.

With this in mind, one of our conclusions is that in terms of describing how AFR is being applied in policing currently, it is more accurate to think of it as “assisted facial recognition,” as opposed to a fully automated system. Unlike border control functions -- where the facial recognition is more of an automated system -- when supporting street policing, the algorithm is not deciding whether there is a match between a person and what is stored in the database. Rather, the system makes suggestions to a police operator about possible similarities. It is then down to the operator to confirm or refute them.

By Bethan Davies, Andrew Dawson, Martin Innes (Source: https://gcn.com/articles/2018/11/30/facial-recognitionpolicing.aspx, accessed May 30^th, 2020)