ICS: European Commission needs to respect IMO CO2 reduction strategy 

The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) AGM in Hong Kong endorsed its support for the UN IMO agreement adopted in April 2018 on a comprehensive strategy to phase out international shipping’s CO₂ emissions completely.  

This includes targets to improve the sector’s CO₂ efficiency by at least 40 percent by 2030 and 70 percent by 2050, and a very ambitious goal to cut the sector’s total GHG emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050 regardless of growth in demand for maritime transport. 

ICS member national associations agreed to contribute constructively to the immediate development of additional IMO regulations that will start to have a direct impact on further reducing international shipping’s CO₂ emissions before 2023, in line with the new IMO strategy. They agreed that ICS should come forward with detailed proposals before the next round of IMO discussions in October on reducing GHG emissions from shipping. 

However, ICS members expressed serious disappointment at the apparent intention of the European Union to press on with the implementation of a regional CO₂ reporting system at variance to the global system already agreed by IMO, despite having given an undertaking to align the MRV regulation with the global regime. 

“We are still waiting to see the final recommendations from the European Commission following a recent consultation”, said ICS Chairman Esben Poulsson. “But the industry has made clear its total opposition to the publication of data about individual ships using abstract operational efficiency metrics that bear no relation to CO₂ emissions in real life and which will be used to penalise shipowners unfairly.

“Anything less than a full alignment with the IMO CO₂ data collection system will be seen as a sign of bad faith by many non-EU nations who recently agreed to the IMO GHG reduction strategy, precisely to discourage such unilateral measures which risk seriously distorting maritime trade and global shipping markets.