Are the International North Sea Conferences making progress?
International Conferences on the Protection of the North Sea have been arranged at intervals since 1984. The first conference in Bremen had a major impact regarding protection of the environmental quality of the North Sea. The following conferences tried to follow up on the outcome and to develop further environmental protection issues. The results of the last few conferences provided in the Ministerial Declarations seems not to provide further impetus to the protection of the North Sea and it can be questioned if further progress can be gained by continuing the row of conferences. By use of a pseudo-scientific method sorting “indicator” words from the Ministerial Declarations into groups according to the “value” of the words this paper tries to assess if the quality of the outcome of the conferences has changed over the years.