UNDER half of pollution warnings issued by an EU satellite monitoring system were checked by member states, a report by the EU’s Court of Auditors has found.

That is just one example of EU member states not utilising tools provided to them by the bloc, the report said, which allows polluting ships to “slip through the net”.

The European Satellite Oil Monitoring Service (CleanSeaNet) has been run by the European Maritime Safety Agency since 2007 and provides high-resolution satellite images to 22 members states to warn of oil spills in their territorial waters.

Between 2022-2023, CleanSeaNet identified a total of 7,731 possible oil spills, the report found, mostly in Spain (1,462), Greece (1,367) and Italy (1,188).

Just 44% of those alerts were checked by member states in that period. Portugal, which received 570 alerts from EMSA, checked just 2% in that two-year period, while Greece checked 32%.

Pollution was confirmed in 7% of cases, the report found, though it stressed that the chance of finding pollution depends on how long it takes for states to act on the images they receive.

Italy, despite checking 88% of its alerts from EMSA, found pollution in just 3% of cases.

But it’s not just a failure to act on satellite images that is potentially allowing pollution to slip through the cracks.

Member states do not perform enough inspections of vessels, which might prevent pollution and that penalties for polluters are too low. Since 2022, the port reception facilities directive has required member states to check 15% of ships that call at its ports. Those inspections check ships are adhering to rules on waste management and the use of port facilities for waste disposal.

Just six of the 22 member states with a coastline hit that 15% target in 2023, and only Bulgaria inspected more than 30% of vessels that called at its ports (56.8%). Germany cited staffing issues behind its failure to hit the target, while France said the directive came too late.

The same issues extend to port state control inspections too, where 11 member states failed to hit their inspection targets.

Vessels that illegally discharge polluting substances into the sea “rarely face effective or dissuasive penalties” an earlier EU Commission report found, and “prosecution is rare”.

Nikolaos Milionis, the ECA member responsible for the audit, said pollution caused by ships “remains a major problem, and despite a number of improvements in recent years, EU action is not really able to steer us out of troubled waters”.

“In fact, with over three-quarters of European seas estimated to have a pollution problem, the zero-pollution ambition to protect people’s health, biodiversity and fish stocks is still not within sight,” he said.

The auditors concluded that neither the EU Commission nor member states track funding used to combat seawater pollution, nor do they have an overview of the results achieved from it. The actual amount of oil spills, contaminants and marine litter from ships remains largely unknown, as does the identity of polluters.

The report recommends the commission assess how reliable those CleanSeaNet alerts are and whether the response of member states is effective, plus ensure that member states are hitting their inspection targets under EU requirements.