IMO Seeks Emission Cuts for Emerging-Nation Ships

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25 Feb 2010

Emissions from shipping would fall about 20 percent as early as 2012 under proposed rules for 169 nations, the secretary general of the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization said. New rules for vessels from rich and emerging nations would probably require owners to adopt so-called slow steaming to cut fuel consumption, said Efthimios Mitropoulos, head of the UN shipping agency known as IMO. For new ships, technical measures including new hull designs for improved propulsion would reduce emissions an additional 15 percent, he said.
Mitropoulos said he will spend the next seven months seeking agreement on measures to ensure IMO oversees shippers’ greenhouse gases and to prevent differing rules for vessels from rich and developing countries, he said. Some emerging nations probably will resist his proposals because they want developed nations to act first, said the 70-year-old Mitropoulos, a shipping regulator for more than 40 years. The U.S. and Europe were responsible for more than half of the emissions in the atmosphere since 1850.
“I consider that it would create a very, very dangerous precedent if we were to move away from the level playing field,” Mitropoulos said yesterday in an interview in London. “It would introduce double standards on an industry that has to be regulated on an equal basis all over the world.”
International shipping contributed about 2.7 percent of global emissions in 2007, according to a July report from the IMO. That share may rise as high as 18 percent by 2050 as trade grows and land-based emissions fall because of greenhouse-gas limits, it said.
Meeting Next Month
The IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee will consider endorsing the new rules next month at a meeting in London, Mitropoulos said. Further approval would be required as early as October after industry consultation, and the rules could come into force as early as February 2012, he said.
An emissions trading program to help the industry further reduce greenhouse gases will be debated next year, he said.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol and last year’s Copenhagen Accord say that global greenhouse gases should be reduced under “common but differentiated responsibilities,” suggesting that the rich nations that produced most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should cut first and fastest.
‘Cannot Apply’
“The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities cannot apply to shipping,” Mitropoulos said. That’s because about 80 percent of ships are based in developing nations, he said.
With separate regulations for rich and poor nations, harbor masters would need to use different rules for one or two ships out of 10 at any one time, he said. Mitropoulos was harbor master in Corfu, Greece, from 1977 to 1979.
The world’s top 15 trading nations account for 65 percent of world trade and own 54 percent of the global shipping fleet in terms of so-called deadweight, according to IMO data. Their corresponding share in registration of ships is 19 percent of the world fleet. Panama has the most registrations, 23 percent by weight.
“If we decided on some onerous measures, which shipowners may not be very happy to comply with because they may have serious financial repercussions, who will stop them from taking their ships from the U.K. flag, the French flag, the German flag?” said Mitropoulos. He has written seven books, including one about avoiding collusions at sea.
“At the end there would be no ships complying with the IMO measures to stem climate change,” he said.
Maersk
A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, the owner of the world’s largest container shipping line, said in November “it’s absolutely essential that a deal will be universal and will work for ships sailing under all flags.” Unless rules apply across the industry “it will skew competition,” Eivind Kolding, chief executive officer of the company’s Maersk Line container unit, said in an interview.
“Our preferred solution is a fee on bunker fuel consumption, because it’s the most simple system,” Kolding said. “We think that a system of trading with quotas will be bureaucratic and unclear,” he said.
The IMO is “best placed” to oversee reducing carbon- dioxide emissions at sea, the International Chamber of Shipping, a trade group representing 33 ship-owners associations, said Dec. 1. A fuel levy, an emissions-trading system or a combination of the two is needed, the chamber said.
Government officials from almost 200 nations met in the Danish capital in December to discuss ways of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. They agreed to the non-binding Copenhagen Accord that seeks targets from rich nations for 2020 and mitigation actions from developing nations.
A lack of proper measuring and reporting of emissions by the shipping industry is helping to force the European Union to draw up regional plans to limit greenhouse gases in the industry, an EU commission official said in November.

Source: Matthew Carr and Alaric Nightingale, Bloomberg