The Marine Vessel Environmental Performance Assessment (MVEP) is being developed to provide vessel designers, owners, operators, and other governing bodies with a standard methodology to measure and to reduce the environmental impact of their ships.
The Phase I Pilot Project wrote a checklist of 35 environmental impacts in the categories of: Energy Efficiency (EE), Air Emissions (AE), Discharges to Water (DW), and General Measures (GM).
Phase 2 Performance Assessment Guide Development is publishing Guides for each impact as T&R Bulletins. This is the Guide for GM-1 Ocean Health and Aquatic Life – Underwater Noise. This guide addresses features of typical commercial ships that produce and/or transmit sound and vibration to the ocean, which then becomes underwater radiated noise.
The guide provides recommendations for the quieting of new vessels during the design phase as well as existing vessels already in operation. Most noise control solutions are broken down into three components: the source, the path(s), and the receiver. In this guide, the first two components are addressed, as it is assumed that the receiver is the ocean, for which no silencing options would be available. Lastly, the guide discusses the usual underwater noise metrics and existing standards that are available for measurement.