You have all the wind in the world to deliver 1.5°C: address to MEPC 80

7 July, 2023 – The IMO has this week moved on climate change. But in the week that delivered us the world’s hottest day ever, for sure it hasn’t moved fast enough. This agreement could and should have been reached twenty years ago. We knew then the dangers of global heating and then as now we had the means to meet the levels of ambition. But back then, these levels of ambition could have set shipping off on a safe 1.5°C pathway. That is not the case today.

Every year a big slice of the 1.5°C carbon budget is consumed and the shipping industry’s room for manoeuvre shrinks. Right now, the industry is gobbling up around 10% of its 1.5°C carbon budget annually, and time is running out and running out fast. By some calculations if emissions fall in line with this agreement the 1.5°C budget will be spent by 2032.

Of course, it is always better late than never, but what you have agreed does not go far enough and is definitely not a 1.5°C pathway. But it is more ambitious than it looked like it might be on Thursday morning and we are grateful to those that took a stand at the last minute to improve the agreement’s indicative checkpoints.

We understand the limitations of multilateral processes but that does not absolve the IMO of its responsibility to ensure that international shipping urgently stops contributing to the climate crisis. Some progress has been made this week but much more remains to be done and we hope that what we have seen here this week is the beginning of a process that will see the IMO quickly align its work with a good chance of keeping global heating below 1.5°C.

In the meantime we would encourage progressive states to implement complementary local, national or regional regulations in the pursuit of emission reductions from this sector. Every tonne of CO2 counts and we have no time to lose.

Finally, let’s stop all this ridiculous talk about shipping being a hard to abate sector. You have all the wind in the world. A limitless, free and entirely non-polluting resource that you are uniquely placed to exploit.

Continue reading

Inside Climate News; Pacific and Caribbean Island Nations Call for the First Universal Carbon Levy on International Shipping Emissions

The International Maritime Organization has been asked to enact a carbon levy of $150 per ton of emissions from large freight and passenger ships. The IMO’s 175 member nations have until next year to vote.

October 21, 2024
Berge Stahl, Berge Stahl Port of Rotterdam, Holland 08-Jul-2006. Photo by Alf van Beem, supplied by Pixabay/WikimediaImages

As this week’s International Maritime Organization’s Marine Environment Protection Committee meeting (IMO, MEPC 82) closed this afternoon, the Clean Shipping Coalition urged the national delegations of countries that support ambitious climate action to properly resource and pick up the pace of negotiations to ensure that shipping’s climate pollution peaks and reduces in line with the IMO’s 2023 GHG strategy, thus curbing the sector’s contribution to the worst impacts of climate breakdown.

October 4, 2024
Infographic: Navigating towards the solution: Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII), a global GHG standard and a levy

London, 27 September 2024:- Ahead of next week’s International Maritime Organization’s Marine Environment Protection Committee meeting (IMO, MEPC 82, September 30-October 4), the Clean Shipping Coalition urged national delegations that support ambitious climate action to also insist that the IMO revise its ship efficiency standards to ensure the organisation’s climate targets are met. Along with […]

September 27, 2024