<\/div>\n What looked at first like a small leak has now become one of Brazil\u2019s most serious environmental disasters. Hundreds of beaches have been polluted in 11 states, covering more than half of the country\u2019s coastline. At least 106 animals, mostly sea turtles, have died.<\/p>\n Investigators have come to believe that Venezuelan oil leaked from a ship travelling in international waters hundreds of kilometres off Brazil\u2019s coast. But the culprit remains elusive.[oilspill_2019 lang=”en”]<\/p>\n The disaster has highlighted the challenge of enforcing global shipping industry rules across the vastness of the ocean. Leaking vessels have caused several catastrophes at sea.<\/p>\n In 2002, the oil tanker Prestige sank<\/a> off the coast of Spain, causing the worst environmental disaster the region had ever seen. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon<\/a> offshore drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest-ever spill in US waters. Last year, an Iranian tanker carrying one million barrels of oil crashed into a freighter<\/a> in the East China Sea, raising fears for marine life.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n While many experts agree the laws governing the global shipping industry are comprehensive, enforcement is highly fragmented. Inspecting ships is sometimes the responsibility of three separate countries: the flag state that registered the ship; the port state where the ship docks; and the state in whose waters the ship is sailing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still common for vessel owners to go for a so-called flag of convenience<\/a>, which means registering the ship in a country with weak regulations. Many of these countries have vastly improved their inspections in recent years. But some of the most popular flag countries, such as Panama and Greece, have thousands of ships to inspect, which can overwhelm them.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \u201cThe framework is pretty good,\u201d said James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. \u201cWhat\u2019s not good is compliance. There are a few problem states undermining the system. And then there are the illegal networks, the criminal networks.\u201d<\/p>\n These networks are commonly involved in illegal fishing<\/a>. But they have also become a concern around countries suffering from trade sanctions, which have more reasons to turn a blind eye to smugglers.<\/p>\n The networks often use dark ships<\/a> \u2013 ships that turn off transponders to make themselves invisible to monitoring systems. They have been found smuggling Venezuelan oil to evade US sanctions, raising concerns among Brazilian officials that they may be behind the disaster.<\/p>\n But that is speculation. The origin of the spill remains a mystery. Leandra Gon\u00e7alves, a researcher at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s Institute of Oceanography, says the fragmented system of governance means some problems, such as the leak, never get reported. Fixing it is key to strengthening the international safety net.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a gap in the international governance of oceans,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd this gap must be closed.\u201d<\/p>\n Santana was born and raised in Cabo do Santo Agostinho, a small beach town in the northeast of Brazil. Aged 36, he works as a paddleboard teacher, catering to thousands of tourists each year.<\/p>\n \u201cNot everyone has studied [or] has a job here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe depend on tourism.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div>\n When the China Dialogue team met Santana, he had been cleaning the beach for 17 days. Atop his paddleboard, he collected the oil wearing four pairs of gloves to avoid contamination.<\/p>\n The thousands of Brazilians that, like Santana, gathered to desperately clean beaches were mostly improvising. Without proper equipment or guidance, they struggled to clean blobs of highly viscous crude oil off the sand, mangroves and rocks.<\/p>\n Across the two states China Dialogue Ocean visited, there were dozens of empty fish stalls and restaurants. Sales, shop owners said, had dropped 80%.<\/p>\n \u201cClients think the fish and shellfish are contaminated,\u201d Dem\u00e9trio Melo, who works at a fishmonger’s in the city of Olinda, said. \u201cThey are scared.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem is made worse because many fishermen here live in poverty and depend on the fish they sell. This is the case with Maria do Socorro, a 51-year-old who lives with her husband and daughter in a 20 square metre wooden house with a dirt floor in the beach town of Nova Cruz.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fish are oiled,\u201d she said. \u201cNo one will buy them.\u201d<\/p>\n The scale of the damage to the environment is still unknown, but more than 10 nationally-protected environmental reserves<\/a> have been poisoned. Valmir Ramos da Silva, director of environment in the city of Barreiros, Pernambuco, left his office to help other residents clean up.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are mostly worried about the river, the estuary,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is one of the least polluted estuaries in Brazil. This won\u2019t only affect biodiversity, but also fishermen. That is their income.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div>\n From August to late November, the oil has reached more than 800 beaches, little by little. On several, volunteers were able to clean most of the oil only to see it show up again a few weeks later.<\/p>\n As Santana worked under the sun with no pay, he watched many in his town go hungry because they couldn\u2019t fish. But he also knew nothing they did would be enough to stop the black tide.<\/p>\n \u201cThis work we are doing needs to be the last one,\u201d Santana said. \u201cBut we don\u2019t have vessels to go to the high seas. And we have no structure to hold off the oil that is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n Fishermen, environmentalists and academics alike were frustrated with what they saw as government inaction.<\/p>\n Officials in cities were discarding the oil<\/a> collected from the beaches in landfills and abandoned buildings, ignoring environmental standards. Volunteers didn\u2019t get medical attention and there wasn\u2019t enough equipment to clean up the oil.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n Many accused the government of far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, of not doing enough. Bolsonaro only ordered<\/a> an investigation into the matter on 5 October, 41 days after the disaster began.<\/p>\n On 18 October<\/a>, federal prosecutors even went to court to force the government to act.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government insists on saying everything is alright. It\u2019s not,\u201d prosecutor<\/a> Ramiro Rockenback told reporters. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening is very serious.\u201d<\/p>\n The source of an oil spill of this magnitude would seem easy to identify. It\u2019s pretty easy to see an enormous tanker struggling at sea as tonnes of oil spills out of it. Companies generally report it, and an aircraft would easily be able to see it.<\/p>\n Not this time. Researchers believe the spill happened roughly a month before it reached the Brazilian coast. By then, a ship, even if it was struggling, would already be gone.<\/p>\n The satellites that roam over us have a limited capacity for collecting and storing data. Over the high seas, their images cannot capture the surface in enough detail to reveal the texture of an oil spill. Anything smaller than 500 square metres is pretty much invisible.<\/p>\n Many, including Brazil\u2019s national environmental protection agency, said it was impossible to catch the culprit using satellites. But some tried regardless.<\/p>\n Leonardo Barros runs a company called Hex that specialises in geospatial technology. He and his team volunteered to help the government.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no doubt the biggest challenge is the availability of data,\u201d Barros said. \u201cThis makes the work more complex and even innovative.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div>\n Using models to determine the ocean currents and winds, they identified a rough area where the oil could have spilled: the South Equatorial Current, which comes from Africa and splits nearer Brazil\u2019s eastern tip, travelling north and south of the coastline. Other researchers agreed.<\/p>\n They then collected the images of satellites belonging to Nasa and the European Space Agency, and processed them. Roughly 700km away from Brazil\u2019s coast, they spotted an indication of a stain over 200km long, and a ship they couldn’t identify.<\/p>\n The next step was to collect ship location data using the automatic identification system, which tracks all ships that have turned on their transponders, as they are obligated to do. Hex was able to find four ships in the area at the time they thought the spill occurred. Only one was carrying Venezuelan oil \u2013 the Greek-flagged Bouboulina.<\/p>\n Hex\u2019s report was the basis for a federal police investigation in early November that fixed the Bouboulina as the main suspect. But the Greek company that owned it, Delta Tankers, strongly denied any oil had leaked from its ship.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n This week, Pedro Binelli, a representative of Brazil\u2019s environmental protection agency, Ibama, told Congress his team believes the stain spotted by Hex was nothing but chlorophyll, a green pigment that indicates the concentration of microscopic organisms called phytoplankton in the water.<\/p>\n Researchers, Binelli said, were now looking for the culprit even further away, closer to Africa.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more time goes by, the harder it becomes to find the origin of the oil stains,\u201d\u00a0he told<\/a> the G1 news website.<\/p>\n Other researchers working independently came up with more theories. At the Federal University of Alagoas<\/a>, a professor pointed to a ship called Voyager 1. The American NGO Skytruth<\/a> looked suspiciously at a ship called The Amigos. Both backtracked from their initial discoveries days later.<\/p>\n Barros explained his company\u2019s report was only one element to help the investigation, and that a dark ship could also have been the culprit.<\/p>\n \u201cIn that time period, in that place \u2026 there were four vessels,\u201d he said. \u201cDoes that eliminate the possibility that an unidentified vessel was also there? No.\u201d<\/p>\n The investigation seems stuck. But there are mechanisms to protect member states of a few international conventions against oil spills even when the source is unknown.<\/p>\n One of them, which establishes the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund<\/a>, guarantees payment of damages to countries that suffer from spills if the shipping company responsible can\u2019t pay or the victim can\u2019t find the guilty ship.<\/p>\n But Brazil has not ratified this convention, meaning if it doesn\u2019t find the guilty ship, it will get no compensation.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n Brazil lacks a robust monitoring system for its seas. In the Brazilian navy, many officials agreed that Brazil should have done a better job of protecting itself, but that would have cost billions.<\/p>\n \u201cWhose fault is it? What failed? Brazil is the victim of an assault,\u201d one official said, asking his name not to be printed. \u201cThis could happen to any country.\u201d<\/p>\n While fishers and residents of hundreds of Brazil\u2019s beach cities feel the effects of the spill, environmentalists are still struggling to measure its impact.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t estimate impact without knowing the location and the amount of oil that was spilled,\u201d said Thiago Almeida, who heads Greenpeace\u2019s climate and energy campaign in Brazil.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n Almeida explained coastal ecosystems are the most vulnerable, as they store most of the nurseries of marine life. But life in the high seas has likely been damaged too.<\/p>\n There, no one can claim compensation. The high seas<\/a> lie beyond the jurisdiction of any one country. They cover over half the planet and are home to 90% of marine life.<\/p>\n![\"man](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_1956_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>Gaps in governance<\/h2>\n
![\"crab](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_3215_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"oil](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_1642_edit-2-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>Stopping the black tide<\/h2>\n
![\"man](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_2542_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"river](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_3413_edit-1440x956.jpg\")
<\/a>F<\/span>rustration<\/span> at<\/span> slow government response<\/h2>\n
![\"skips](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_3327_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>Mission impossible: finding the source<\/h2>\n
![\"pile](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_2053_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"tourist](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_3288_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>Who pays for the pollution?<\/h2>\n
![\"soldier](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_2880_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>Beyond national jurisdiction<\/h2>\n
![\"puddle](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_2955_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/MA_1939_edit-1440x960.jpg\")
<\/a>