Greening Shipping to Protect Ocean Health
This week we celebrate World Oceans Day 2020 and this year’s theme is “Innovation for a Sustainable Ocean”.
The debate over the role of seafarers and shipping and ocean health has gone from one where the maritime sector was largely invisible to today’s conversation where shipping is increasingly seen as a central pillar.
It is a multi-faceted conversation. More than 80 per cent of all goods traded in the world are moved by ships. More than 65,000 ships from small coastal boats to the largest man-made behemoths over 250,000 tonnes and over 400m long, covering every possible transport route on our oceans.
Such ships have a direct effect on our ocean and ecosystems. If shipping was a country it would be a Greenhouse Gas emitter of the scale of industrialised countries like Japan and Germany.
Shipping must decarbonise if any goal of staying under 1.5 degree C is to be achieved. Not only do such emissions contribute to the climate crisis, they are also direct contributors to ocean acidification. So shipping has a direct responsibility for the probably irreversible harm being made to coral and fish ecosystems.
Ships that burn Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) are also a major emitter of sulphur dioxide, which has enormous public health implications, especially for coastal and port communities. After nearly two decades of negotiation, new low sulphur limits finally came into force this year.
These will dramatically cut sulphur emissions from all international shipping and that should go a long way to reducing this impact.
The scale of world shipping, which continues to grow decade on decade, means such impacts are likely to increase exponentially into the future. The major shipping lanes are now so congested that the exhaust trails from shipping is capable of artificially producing unique localised weather systems on such routes - in particular increased lightning and thunderstorms. Our ships around the world are crewed by more than 1.2 million seafarers (the overwhelming majority being males).
Often hard, lonely lives, these essential workers spend weeks and months at sea and distanced from family and society to allow shipping ply its trade. The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced how vulnerable this community of skilled workers are. The new border restrictions mean many are literally stranded on their ships and unable to make port for rotations.
In the past 50 years, Pacific mariners were in high demand as ship’s crew and their remittances were important components of national economies for countries such as Tuvalu and Kiribati. Today less so.
As the connection between shipping and Ocean Health becomes clearer and globally more visible, we are left asking what the innovative solutions are – globally and here in the Pacific. It is obvious that the new normal cannot be a continuation of the high polluting past. Currently the Pacific is approaching this from two directions. Working from the top down, Fiji continues alongside like-minded Pacific States to press hard at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) for the highest possible ambition in quickly reducing shipping’s emissions profile.
Setting these global shipping targets are key to driving innovation at a global level. While the pandemic has meant the suspension of IMO meetings in London, we are using the COVID-19 space to talanoa and prepare our Pacific delegations for the next round of negotiations when they resume.
At the same time, the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport (MCST) is a knowledge partner in the Global Maritime Forum’s Getting to Zero initiative, a large-scale industry led push to have non fossil fuel vessels operating commercially around the world by 2030.
Minister Kitlang Kabua, the Republic of the Marshall Islands Education Minister was the keynote speaker at last week’s Virtual Oceans Dialogues shipping event.
She spoke forcibly on the need to for global change that is just and equitable and, most importantly, leaves none behind.
These forums are important because they ensure that a consistent, united Pacific voice is being heard and listened to by the global industry captains that are now leading large-scale change. We need to be assured that this rising tide will lift even our small Pacific ships with it.
And at home Fiji and RMI continue to develop the planning and design of the Pacific Blue Shipping Partnership, the initiative to invest $500 million of blended finance across a number of Pacific countries to catalyze a large scale transition in our island shipping to new clean high efficiency ships.
If the Pacific is going to talk the talk in international climate change and ocean health negotiations, it must of course walk the walk at home.
The Pacific Blue Shipping Partnership is the platform to achieve this in a very practical sense.
Fiji is ideally situated to be the big winner from this programme.
Not only is it the major economy and major transshipment hub in the central Pacific, it also has the manufacturing, industrial and finance base to be the major technology supplier and servicer for regional change. Greening shipping is not just about having non-fossil fuel ships – it’s about investing strategically in all the secondary and tertiary industry needed to keep the ships working – everything from maritime paint solutions to insurance underwriting. The time for innovation for a sustainable Pacific is now.