Thousands of oil spills unreported and hardly any punished - report

Just 474 out of more than 90,000 oil spills from ships were reported to authorities over a five-year period and barely any resulted in punishment, according to a report.

- Leana Hosea Saroj Pathirana

The figure obtained from Lloyd's list by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations shows the number of pollution incidents reported between 2014 and 2019 compared with a study using satellite imagery to count the number of slicks from ships in the same period.

Dr Elizabeth Atwood from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory said that the level of underreporting in the industry remained a "huge unknown".

"The argument that has historically been made is that there is an equal amount coming from natural seeps," she said. "But recent research keeps underlining that this is not true for much of the globe."