The International Chamber of Shipping said it will support the concept regulating carbon dioxide emissions from ships.
Meeting in London on Tuesday, the ICS board reviewed recent developments with respect to the international regulation of CO2 emissions from ships. This included proposals by the United States and the European Commission, and others, concerning the establishment of a mandatory system of Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of emissions (MRV).
ICS Chairman Masamichi Morooka said “our meeting agreed that ICS will fully support the concept of MRV, provided that any measure adopted is developed and agreed at the International Maritime Organization, and that it will be simple to administer and primarily based on fuel consumption measured by bunker delivery notes.
“However, ICS support for the development of an MRV mechanism does not imply acceptance of MRV being used for the eventual development of any other market-based measure, or the mandatory application of energy indexing measures to existing ships,” he added.
The chamber said it’s developing a detailed position on how MRV might work, but is waiting for formal submissions to be made by governments at the next meeting of the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee in May.
In other action, ICS said its board “expressed serious concern” about proposals being considered by the European Union for an EU regulation on ship recycling.
“The EU regulation being considered by the EU Parliament risks completely undermining the International (Hong Kong) Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which was adopted by IMO in 2009. The EU proposals include a fund to which EU ship operators would have to pay in order to ensure that their ships are recycling in accordance with EU standards, rather than those already agreed by governments at IMO. The ulterior motive of the European Parliament seems to be a wish to create work for ship recycling facilities in Europe,” the chamber warned.
The IMO convention was adopted to address concerns about environmental and working conditions in ship recycling yards which for the most part are located in Asia. “If the EU Regulation goes ahead in its current form, it is very hard to see how the IMO Convention can ever enter into force,” Morooka said.
“As well as damaging the EU registered fleet, undermining the Hong Kong Convention will do little to help workers in the recycling yards in developing nations who will continue to be engaged in dismantling the majority of the world’s redundant ships, and whose workload is already increasing in view of the chronic over capacity that exists throughout the shipping industry.” Morooka said. “It must be hoped that the governments of EU Member States, which are signatories to the Hong Kong Convention, will start to see sense and stop these damaging proposals before it is too late.”
The ICS board reviewed the continuing response at the IMO to the Costa Concordia cruise ship accident, and welcomed measures that have so far been taken forward relating to passenger safety and evacuation procedures.
“The response of IMO so far has been measured and reasonable and we have been impressed by the commitment amongst governments to avoid knee jerk reactions,” Morooka said. “But IMO is under increasing pressure to take forward far more radical steps in advance of Italy publishing the complete results of its accident investigation, which it has still singularly failed to do. Given the seriousness of the disaster, which happened over a year ago, this failure by Italy is simply unacceptable. We still have no official understanding of what the underlying causes were with respect to an accident that really should never have happened.” – Chris Dupin
Shipping Chamber says it will support emissions regulation
