Oceangoing ships are not the cleanest form of transportation. Their fuels usually have high sulfur content, which leads to high particulate emissions. And air that is high in particulates has been linked to health problems like asthma, heart attacks and lung cancer, particularly among people who live in coastal areas.
As a result, the International Maritime Organization has adopted policies calling for reducing the sulfur content of marine fuels, from an average of about 3 percent currently to 0.5 percent by 2020. A few areas have been created, notably in the Baltic and North seas, that will require use of fuel with even less sulfur.
A study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology suggests that such reductions, if enforced, would cut the number of potential premature deaths due to ship emissions in half in some cases.
James J. Winebrake of the Rochester Institute of Technology and colleagues modeled the impact of reducing sulfur content globally, and within 200 miles of coastal areas, versus maintaining the status quo. They found that by 2012, with no reduction in sulfur content, about 87,000 premature deaths annually could be attributed to ship emissions.
Reducing sulfur content to half of one percent worldwide would cut that number by about 41,000, they said.
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