Environmental disaster in Croatia – Hvar floods with ship waste

The Croatian island of Hvar, located on the Adriatic coast, is considered one of the sunniest in the country and one of the most beautiful in the world. For this reason, it has been extremely popular with Polish tourists for years. Unfortunately, with the start of the tourist season, Hvar is once again struggling with marine pollution, which, like last year, led to an environmental disaster in Croatia.

Hvar island’s coast floods with sewage from cruise ships

The beginning of the holiday season should be a cause for rejoicing on the island of Hvar. Unfortunately for tourism workers in the region, the current situation brings worries instead of enthusiasm. The beaches are turning into garbage dumps, and the surrounding waters are turning brown. The scale of pollution is so great that what is happening in this area of Croatia can already be described as an environmental disaster.

The cause of the pollution of the Adriatic waters is cruise ships passing through the Hvar channel, located between the island and the mainland. Non-compliance with wastewater discharge regulations and illegal discharges from onboard tanks directly into the sea lead to degradation of the marine environment. As a result, cooking oils, solid waste and other pollutants are carried by ocean currents to the island’s coastal beaches, significantly reducing water quality and threatening ecosystems and tourism.

The worst situation is around the town of Jelsa, but the entire coast is struggling with brown patches of pollution that appear in the afternoon and are carried by sea currents. Some of these spots reach as much as 150 meters in diameter. The phenomenon intensifies when boats return from Hvar to the mainland, turning the blue water into murky and full of pollution.

Sewage off the coast of the island of Hvar is not a new problem

The current situation facing tourism entrepreneurs and residents on the island of Hvar is not new. There was a similar problem in Hvar’s bays a year ago as well. Unfortunately, the local authorities did not take any action on this issue at the time.

Local communities are taking independent initiatives to protect their beaches from pollution by installing filter barriers in the water. These, however, only effectively retain larger waste. At the same time, representatives of the tourism sector are appealing to Croatian authorities not to underestimate the problem. They demand intensified inspections of cruise ships, monitoring how they discharge wastewater, and call for sanctions against those responsible for pollution from the Hvar channel. They also plan to report the situation to relevant institutions, including the District Department of Environmental Protection of Municipal Affairs and Infrastructure, as well as the District Port Authority and Split Port Authority, to initiate corrective and preventive measures.

Can the environmental disaster in Croatia be prevented?

The solution to the current environmental situation in Croatia seems relatively simple and includes tightening controls on cruise ships. The main goal is to identify units that violate maritime laws. The importance of this measure is underscored by the fact that the Adriatic Sea has been declared an ecologically sensitive area by the International MARPOL Convention. The convention is designed to prevent marine pollution from ships, making scrupulous enforcement of these regulations a key element in protecting the marine environment. According to the convention, the Adriatic Sea, due to its unique oceanographic and ecological conditions and the nature of ship traffic, requires special mandatory methods to prevent oil pollution at sea. Meanwhile, the lack of adequate control measures is, as it were, an acquiescence by the authorities to illegal wastewater discharges and ignoring international environmental standards.

In addition to inspections, the islanders stress, preventive measures are needed to prevent similar situations in the future. One of them may be the creation of a system for collecting waste from marine vessels in the region, failure to comply with which will be subject to heavy fines.

With the environmental catastrophe unfolding in Croatia, it is also worth remembering that the pollution drifting in the Adriatic waters and making its way to the beaches off the coast of Hvar Island is not only threatening local tourism. Flooding sewage and other waste can also cause serious damage to local ecosystems, leading to irreversible changes. Therefore, the solution to this problem should come as soon as possible.

Photo. main: Bells Mayer/Unsplash