Skip to main content

Northwestern Student Explores Ways to Designate Underwater Noise as a Pollutant

Sophie Liu | March 5, 2019
Share This:

Sound is a way of life and survival in the deep ocean. Whales use clicks, whistles, and songs to locate food, raise calves, and find mates. For thousands of years, the Arctic Ocean has been a natural sound sanctuary for marine mammals. But now, the water is filling with industrial noise. 

As sea ice melts due to climate change, more shipping, mining, natural resource extraction, fisheries, and tourism are moving into Arctic waters. Arctic shipping traffic is expected to quadruple by 2025, according to an Arctic Today report.  

The ocean noise makes it difficult for walrus mothers and calves to reunite using vocal cues when they get separated, makes Beluga whales lose hair cells in their ears in response to excessive noise, and causes commercial fish species to abandon their habitats by affecting their ability to locate food, evade predators, and find mates. It’s altering the underwater acoustic landscape, harming and endangering marine species worldwide. 

“We think the open ocean should be a tranquil and calm place, but it’s not,” says Linda Qiu, a third-year Northwestern University law student. “It’s incredibly loud down there all the time, and it has a very big impact on wildlife.”

Qiu, who studied environmental science as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has always been passionate about environmental issues. Under the guidance of Nancy Loeb, Clinical Associate Professor of Law and director of Northwestern’s Environmental Advocacy Center (EAC), Qiu analyzed regional and international laws and regulations for advocacy opportunities to classify “noise” as a pollutant and protect Arctic species. 

That’s the next phase of a project that aims to address noise pollution in the Arctic, building on the collaboration between EAC and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Previously, EAC students have conducted research regarding the existing legal frameworks to address Arctic noise at the national level. They found very limited national laws to provide precedence, according to Qiu. She is trying to find out what specific legal paths WWF can take to advocate for this change – to have underwater noise designated as a pollutant at regional, or even international levels. 

Four Frameworks 

Qiu looked at what regional and international bodies or treaties exist and how they could be leveraged in the pursuit of new regulation or legislation in countries with Arctic territory. She focused particularly on four different international frameworks that might be possible places for noise to be defined as a pollutant, going forward.

One of them is United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The UN treaty is considered the controlling law for most international operations related to the high seas – oceans, seas, and waters outside national jurisdiction. UNCLOS applies to all the waters in the Arctic that don’t belong to any countries as sovereign territory. The U.S. has not formally agreed to the treaty and is not a member, but on most jurisdictional issues treats UNCLOS as accepted international law.

The Arctic Council codes, International Maritime Organization (IMO) codes, and one relatively new treaty among ten different countries–known as the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement—offer other avenues. IMO operates from within the UN, and it is specific to the regulation of shipping. It is the most active organization in terms of how many binding legal instruments they have actually passed, and how effective the laws are. The problem is, IMO’s jurisdiction relates almost exclusively to international shipping.

“My work has been looking at what types of regulations IMO currently has that might be related to noise and what research they are doing related to it,” Qiu says. “Is there any pending legislation that they are working on and, if WWF wants to work with IMO, what avenue specifically would they [WWF] take?” Qiu says. 

International Collaboration 

“Depending on where the sources of underwater noise come from, or how it’s produced, underwater noise can travel very long distances,” says Melanie Lancaster, the Arctic species specialist with the WWF who has helped oversee Qiu’s project. Qiu also discovered in her research that this is one of the reasons underwater noise is comparatively more difficult to regulate than other pollutants with physical forms, such as oil and sewage. 

In the hunt for offshore oil and gas, ships equipped with high-powered air guns fire compressed air into the water every 10 to 12 seconds for weeks to months on end. The deafening sound can travel as far as 2,500 miles, disrupt foraging, mating, and other vital behaviors of endangered whales, such as North Atlantic right whales, blue whales, fin whales, sei whales, and gregarious humpbacks. 

Countries have the authority to unilaterally conduct activities that may cause underwater noise—oil and gas exploration for example—within their own sovereign waters. “The noise from that site can travel underwater for thousands of miles,” Qiu says. Constructions approved by one country can impact wildlife throughout the region. “There is a need for solutions that are international or more global in scope because it [noise] is too hard to keep within borders,” she says. 

Potential Opportunities

Earlier this semester, Qiu drafted a memo laying out all existing regional agreements related to noise, including those recommending necessary limitations. But one thing that disturbs her is that the efforts are merely non-binding recommendations. “There’s no actual obligation or duty on the people within that region to do anything about it,” she says.  

She is working on a more comprehensive memo about the four aforementioned governance frameworks and analyzing in-depth the legal procedure to “provide WWF with advice on how to advocate effectively,” Qiu says. For example, as an organization within UN, what is the procedure for how IMO makes new treaties? What kind of researches are they currently doing on noise? What are the legal responsibilities of the IMO countries? And what are the enforcement consequences if you don’t follow that? 

The realization of how few mechanisms there are to adequately address the noise pollution problem is very discouraging, Qiu says. “There is not much awareness on the issue. When it comes to environmental problems there are so many things to worry about,” she adds, and many people have not come to realize the problem of ocean noise.  

WWF is advocating along multiple international channels, including the IMO and Arctic Council, for stronger regulation for underwater noise and special protection for important habitats for Arctic marine mammals, that includes protection from noise producing activities, according to Lancaster. 

“Linda’s work has given us multiple pathways where we can look to have underwater noise legally designated as a pollutant,” Lancaster says. It also gives WWF indications of how long it may take to achieve such a designation depending on the legal pathways WWF may choose to pursue. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another 15 years before we see a UN treaty about noise pollution in the oceans,” Qiu says, “I’ve always known that these types of changes take a really long time [to bring about].” She believes it great to be in a part of the early stage of problem-solving and start working on it. 

Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic–which encompasses EAC–is one of the opportunities at Northwestern Law that appealed to Qiu even before she applied to the school. Enabled by the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), this collaboration between WWF and EAC allows Qiu to do “real work that has an impact,” according to her. “It’s a great opportunity to be able to feel like you are really practicing and to have a client you are obligated to communicate and follow instructions from,” she says. 

“It opens up opportunities for our students to engage in work-related sustainability,” Loeb agrees. “We hope that it brings value both to the clinic students in terms of their education and to WWF.” 

Related Stories