The World Shipping Council (WSC), whose members transport over 90 percent of international containerized trade, said it welcomes last week's agreement by the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization on a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out how to do it.
The IMO said the “initial strategy” adopted by its Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) “envisages for the first time a reduction in total GHG emissions from international shipping, which, it says, should peak as soon as possible and to reduce the total annual GHG emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050 compared to 2008, while, at the same time, pursuing efforts towards phasing them out entirely.”
WSC said the action “is important for both political and practical reasons. In political terms, the agreement demonstrates to the world that IMO member governments can find a common way forward despite real differences of opinion,” said WSC. “This is a global challenge, and it can only be effectively addressed at a global level. As a practical matter, the size of the planned emissions cuts makes it clear that the shipping industry can only meet these objectives by a transition over time to new fuels and new propulsion systems.”
“We have to shift from a political mindset to an engineering mindset,” said John Butler, the president and chief executive officer of the WSC.“To do that we must establish a maritime research and development effort that will deliver the tools necessary to transform the industry.”
WSC said it and other organizations have said there is a “need for a substantial, focused and sustained research and development effort — organized through the IMO — to create the technological tools necessary to implement the ambitious climate goals that the IMO has now articulated.”
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International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) said the IMO strategy is the first global climate framework for shipping and “includes quantitative GHG reduction targets through 2050 and a list of candidate short-, mid- and long-term policy measures to help achieve these targets. The strategy implies that international shipping would consume between 3.8 percent and 5.8 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget under the Paris Agreement, up from 2.3 percent in 2015.”
ICCT said an IMO working group will meet later this year and focus “on developing an implementation plan for short-term measures” and that the MEPC in two upcoming meetings will deliberate on whether to tighten the existing Energy Efficiency Design Index standards for new ships.