A BRUTALLY ugly portmanteau was coined this week.

“Collaboraction” is the latest buzz-term being bandied about by industry leaders, apparently in a bid to talk their way out of the existential climate crisis that has left them overwhelmed with opportunity, but short on vocabulary.

As the great and the good gathered in Athens this week for the Global Maritime Forum’s annual confab, collaboration and action were in such high demand that contractions were necessary.

It was, in the words of the Greek shipping minister who joined the proceedings’ denouement on Thursday, now “a moral and political imperative” to collaborate and act immediately.

But for all the breathless insistence that the industry’s narrative had changed and a new phase of the energy transition was in sight, there was worryingly little detail on show to support the claims that progress had been made since last year’s event.

Asked to sum up the key conclusions of the two-day talking shop, one US energy executive quoted Elvis’ entreaty for “a little less conversation, and a little more action”.

The GMF, for the uninitiated, is a not-for-profit organisation that convenes leaders from across the maritime community with policymakers, experts, NGOs and other influential decision-makers. While its membership may flinch at such reductive descriptions, it essentially represents the self-identifying progressive wing of the industry’s companies and, despite its global ambitions, retains a northern European dominated agenda.

To be clear, the conversations at this year’s edition of the GMF had changed, but not in the way that many had expected.

The lack of regulatory ambition has been a consistent thread woven though GMF discussions over the past six years and the glacial pace of change within the International Maritime Organization was routinely the blocker identified as preventing progress towards shipping’s zero-carbon future.

But the greenhouse gas reduction pathway agreed by the IMO in July has stripped away a convenient scapegoat and left many who had not expected such an ambitious agreement to emerge, rather exposed.

Net-zero GHG emissions “by or around” 2050, a 5%-10% uptake of zero or near zero GHG emission fuels, indicative checkpoints demanding emission reduction by 20%, striving to 30%, by 2030 and the adoption of life cycle GHG assessment guidelines — it all adds up to something of a game changer for the industry’s internal narrative.

Policy shock

Episodes such as the GMF event are starting to reveal that the industry has not yet edited its assumptions to account for the policy gear shift that has happened around them.

The fundamental question remains whether demand for, and supply of, scalable zero-emission fuels is on track to reach 5% by 2030 — a level that would indicate market maturity and the potential to deliver on a transition for shipping that is aligned with global climate objectives.

The answer, it seems, is less clear than it was 12 months ago, now that the difficult detail of the ambition has started to require near-term tangible action to avoid being caught out as being behind the previously laggard regulator.

Ships are being ordered and zero-emission fuel production is under development, but at nowhere near the pace demanded by the GMF’s 5% breakthrough target — a target which most concede should be nearer 10% to remain on track with Paris Agreement alignment ambitions.

While the new generation of dual-fuel ships have been publicly hailed as a example of action and progress, privately there are deep concerns that the recent influx of methanol capable orders, spurred by customer demand in the container sector and hedging against first-mover rivals, may not have received a huge amount of detailed due diligence when it comes to sourcing fuel supplies.

Just because a methanol-capable ship has been ordered, it does not mean that ship will necessarily run on methanol, green or otherwise.

Zero-emission fuel production currently in operation or under construction, represents roughly 20% of the capacity needed to stay on track by 2025 and just 4% of what is required by 2030. That is without accounting for demand from other sectors, which given shipping’s current unwillingness to engage in long-term offtake agreements is likely to be significantly more advanced in other so-called “hard to abate sectors”.

Such forecasts are, of course, pretty blunt instruments, and the range of potential variables could see projects deliver a fraction of the required fuels or double the target such is the current level of uncertainty in demand scenarios from shipping and other sectors.

But that is not being helped by the current trend in orders for zero-emission capable vessels suggest that 2030 targets could be more than 70% off where they need to be.

For all the bold pronouncements of shipping having entered a new phase of the energy transition, it seems that the chicken and egg dilemma of what comes first, the fuel or the ships, has not yet been sufficiently cracked. But such projections also do the nature of the GMF discussion and process a huge disservice.

The forum’s annual event falls somewhere between a Davos-style leadership summit and a self-help group for reformist C-suite types determined to forge a new direction for the industry, or at least not to let the competition do it for them.

But these are no mere passive reflection and head-shaking sessions. What emerges is a genuinely progressive exchange of ideas that has evolved over the past half a decade into series of programmes arguably leading the agenda, but also demanding action from its membership.

“To find the answers to the challenges we face, we need questions to be framed in a new way. If we are not asking the right questions, we will not get to where we want to be,” offered one CEO sage to the group. The group nodded appreciatively in response.

There’s no such thing as a bad idea at GMF.

There was no marquee initiative this year to support the ambition to action theme beyond the pronouncement from a group of 30 leading maritime companies who pledged their ambition to adopt vessel optimisation strategies, but action was evident across existing initiatives.

The GMF has spawned programmes such as the Poseidon Principles for Financial Institutions and the Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance and the Sea Cargo Charter, which have advanced industry accountability, enforcement, and transparency at a remarkable pace among their membership.

Setting a benchmark

The acronym soup of industry accelerators and decarbonisation centres that have sprung up around it may beg to differ, but the GMF’s programmes have set the industry standard when it comes to advancing decarbonisation from ambition to action.

Hosting this year’s event in Athens was a bold attempt to win over a Greek shipping community not entirely won over by the northern European sensibilities, or agenda. While it paid off in part, with a smattering of local faces engaging tentatively in the discussion, even the GMF’s biggest supporters concede that they lack sufficient global representation.

“Is it going fast enough? No, of course not. We are facing an environmental crisis,” argued GMF co-founder and CEO Johannah Christensen. But the conversations being had inside the GMF are about producing progress and, from that perspective, significant achievements are being made, she said.

“Progress does not always happen in leaps and bounds. It happens in these tiny, incremental steps that accumulate. What we are observing here in the GMF is all those little shifts, all those little steps that over time will accumulate to the momentous change that we need as an industry,” said Christensen.

Try as they might, the GMF set cannot will an energy transition into existence alone. It is not possible to sit in a room for two days once a year, conceive a plan and execute it. But stripped of scapegoats and spurred by progress there is now realism creeping into the discussions that have moved from ambition to action and the answers to the seemingly intractable problems that they are discussing will, at least in part, be found in those conversations and possibly even from their “collaboractions”.