Newsroom Blog
AS ANYONE who has read a shipping company trading statement over the past year will have realised, the word ‘challenging’ has become a euphemism favoured by chief financial officers looking to downplay the seriousness of their latest losses.
Now the same term has crept into the regulatory sphere, particularly when talking about greenhouse gases.
The uncertainty created by the United Nations climate change summit in December has left shipping rudderless in its search to find ways of reducing its emissions. With no regulatory clarity on the horizon, the high-capital, long-term investment needed to develop serious green ship technology is going to be difficult to justify.
The fact that Copenhagen failed to produce even an ‘aspirational’ set of reduction targets speaks volumes about the complex web of politics beyond the shipping industry’s control and poses a real problem for a sector that needs to make long-term investment decisions.
With some governments eyeing up shipping as a potential cash cow to fund the international approach to tackling climate change, the threat of future financial hits to the industry has not gone away.
While the International Maritime Organization will continue with developing market based instruments, the politics that mired pre-Copenhagen discussions at IMO have not disappeared. Meanwhile, the threat of regional action now looks inevitable and a confusing and costly patchwork of requirements for shipowners beckons.
The shipping industry has been left well and truly challenged.
Comments (1)
Comment by
Co-Founder Daniel Kane
- Wednesday 10 February 2010
I think these activities of EU, EPA or IMO could be considered 'outer' activities, and the lack of progress is not an excuse for shipowners who lack internal activities to do something about documenting, benchmarking and reducing emission. For example there are plenty of studies on the benefits of blasting hulls in the yard, cleaning hulls in service as well as polishing propellers to reduce emission; how many shipowners take any of this seriously now? Seems they will just wait till they are forced to.
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