The last few years emission regulations for shipping have become increasingly tougher and will become even more so in the future. For the new sulfur directives to work efficiently, it is necessary that they are enforced. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the countries surrounding the SECA areas would act to ensure that the sulfur directives are enforced. The study also aims to look at how compliance checks are carried out, and also see if countries have imposed sanctions against breaches and what these mean. In order to answer these questions a lot of laws and regulations were studied, but most importantly questionnaires were sent to the responsible authorities in various countries in the SECA areas. The result from this study is that all countries consider that enforcement takes place in sufficient numbers and all countries use the same method of measuring sulfur content in fuels. In Sweden an optical measurement method to measure the sulfur content in the exhaust gases from the air is under development, but this method is still uncertain. The results also revealed that because of several factors, in some countries it is very difficult to prosecute someone if they violate current sulfur regulations, so there is a risk of ships breaking the regulations. Meanwhile in some countries they do act against breaches even though they all use the same method of enforcement. Nor is there any sanctions against breaches in several of the participating countries.