Commenting on a recent EU report, that tackled the topic of differentiated port infrastructure charges and the benefits and challenges of their implementation, the Baltic Ports Organization (BPO) expressed the opinion that the use of environmental charging should stay voluntary at the EU level.
According to the report, “environmental charging” is being mentioned increasingly more often as measure employed by the ports in their quest to become more eco-friendly. It has already inspired a number of ports to voluntarily implement certain initiatives, aimed at lowering the shipping sector’s negative impact on the environment, e.g. the Environmental Shipping Index, Clean Baltic Sea Shipping and Green Award.
Bogdan Oldakowski, BPO Secretary General, commenting on the report, said: “BPO welcomes DG Move’s report on environmentally differentiated port charges. It is a very good and comprehensive study on how EU ports, among them quite many Baltic ports, apply these kinds of schemes to support the use of environmental technologies and management by ship-owners.”
The report mentions various environmental and economic benefits, which may result from differentiated “environmental charging”. For example, the report states that based on a simulation carried out for the report, a discount of 20% on port dues in all EU ports for vessels certified with an ESI score of 30 points may lead up to a 4,34% reduction of current NOx, SOx and PM emissions in the EU – under the assumption that 14% of the EU fleet were eligible for the discount.
Were all EU ports (as well as Norway and Turkey) to decide to implement an environmental charging scheme, the resulting financial incentives for the shipping sector could reach up to 1,4 billion euro over a 5-year period.
That said, an inappropriate implementation of “environmental charging” does pose risks. Voluntary nature of these incentives, which as of now remain regulated individually by the ports, might result in a spike in prices, in turn leading to a drop in business volumes, BPO notes.
