Will the IMO tighten the rules around carbon emissions?

International shipping makes an outsized and growing contribution to the climate crisis. Ships also regularly kill whales and generate underwater noise that compromises the ability of whales and other marine life to forage and reproduce. By going more slowly, ships could slash their climate emissions and reduce both underwater noise and the risk of whale strikes—but as JOHN MAGGS explains, this shift won’t happen without ambitious regulation.

Fortunately, an opportunity exists right now for just that kind of action. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is revising the rules around its Carbon Intensity Indicator, a metric for measuring and regulating ships’ carbon emissions. Governments are consulting and reviewing evidence on barriers to efficiency and potential solutions. A decision on improving the indicator will be made in early 2025.

If designed properly, these new rules could address almost half of shipping’s climate impacts and deliver massive ocean health co-benefits. But the outcome is far from certain.

The scope of the problem

Ninety percent of everything we send around the world travels by ship, and these ships burn a lot of fuel. They are massive, and the distances they travel are huge. As a result, the industry generates around three per cent of all climate emissions globally—a contribution equivalent to that of the whole economy of a country the size of Germany or Japan.

Ships are also undermining ocean health. We have all heard about the environmental devastation caused by oil spills when a tanker runs aground or collides with another ship. But ships are responsible for a myriad of other routine, yet damaging, operational practices—some legal, some not—that threaten ocean wildlife: oil and chemical discharges, toxic paint coatings, underwater noise pollution, sewage and greywater discharges, and the dumping of plastics, to name just a few.

Shipping also threatens human health. An estimated 250,000 deaths and millions of childhood asthma cases annually are caused by toxic air pollution from shipping.

In all these areas, regulation has failed to keep up with the growth of the industry. Sporadic and weak measures mean the problem keeps getting worse.

Turning the page?

But the IMO’s coming revision of its Carbon Intensity Indicator is an important opportunity to address both the climate and ocean health impacts of global shipping and turn the tide on some of these problems.

By far the most effective way to reduce ship climate impacts is to slow ships down. A 10 per cent speed reduction can lower emissions by almost 30 per cent. In some cases, this will mean using additional ships. But even in these situations, there are still massive net emission reduction benefits. And slowing ships down can happen immediately—we don’t need new technology just to take our foot off the gas pedal.

We can also look at wind power. In a case of “back to the future,” new high-tech sails can dramatically reduce fuel burn (and thus emissions) on existing ships, and can go even further when ships are designed from scratch to use wind as their primary means of propulsion. No other transport mode can harness wind power directly in this way. This ability is shipping’s climate crisis superpower.

Most underwater noise pollution is caused by ship propellers, so using sails and slowing ships down has a dramatic effect on noise levels. Slower ships are also less likely to strike and kill whales and other marine wildlife. And any action that reduces the amount of fuel burned doesn’t only reduce climate emissions—it also cuts emissions of everything that is connected to burning fuel, including the particulates that are harmful to human health and the oily sludge that ship fuels generate, which are so often dumped illegally at sea.

Finally, reducing fuel burn also decreases the waste produced by the exhaust gas cleaning systems, or scrubbers, that ship owners have started installing to avoid using cleaner fuels. This shocking new waste stream is entirely unregulated and dwarfs other shipping pollution in terms of volume.

Anticipating the arguments

Some of you may be asking yourselves: Surely ship owners are willing to take positive steps to reduce their climate impact by operating their vessels efficiently purely out of self-interest and a desire to minimize costs? Unfortunately, no. Often, there is a “split incentive,” whereby the entity responsible for the technical efficiency of a ship and its equipment isn’t the one paying for the fuel.

Inefficient ship operation is also often deliberately written into long-established conventions and contractual arrangements—the most famous one being the instruction in charter agreements to travel at “utmost dispatch” (quickly) and wait at destination if you get there too early. Slowing down and arriving on time would make more sense, but would also be a breach of the agreement.

And in a booming market when few ships are without work, an individual owner acting from a business perspective might prefer to speed up and squeeze in an extra trip. Unfortunately, this is the worst approach from a climate, environment and ocean health point of view.

It’s rare that a single measure or regulation holds the potential to have such wide-ranging positive impacts on the climate and environmental footprint of an industry. The revision of the IMO’s Carbon Intensity Indicator truly holds the possibility to set the shipping industry on a much more sustainable path. But if we are to get there, governments must close their ears to industry “special pleading” and agree to a set of transparent, ambitious and enforceable new requirements for the efficient operation of ships. This is how we build a more ocean-friendly industry.