Yale University has reported that as the world moves to slash CO2 emissions, the shipping and aviation sectors have managed to remain on the sidelines. But the pressure is now on these two major polluting industries to start controlling their emissions at last.
International aviation and shipping emissions were excluded from the Paris pact, which introduced limits on greenhouse gas emissions for all nations starting in 2020. With power generation, manufacturing, domestic transport, deforestation, and even changes in land use all now constrained, calls are growing for these two big sectors to be tamed as well. Aviation and shipping each emit roughly the same volume of CO2 annually as the U.K. or Germany, and unlike the emissions of those two countries, their greenhouse gases continue to rise dramatically. Between 1990 and 2010, their contributions to the accumulation of planet-warming CO2 in the atmosphere rose by an average 3 percent a year, three times faster than overall global CO2 emissions.
By the end of the year, the U.N. agencies charged with controlling aviation and shipping will decide whether to cap their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. If they cannot, then calls by scientists, activists, and climate negotiators for the decisions to be taken out of the industries’ hands will intensify. International transportation has been left out of U.N. agreements on fighting climate change because it does not fit easily into control regimes, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which are based on national targets.
Under the ICAO’s draft plan, aviation emissions will be capped at 2020 levels.Though the ICAO has pledged to prevent double-counting, critics fear that airlines will simply fund projects to which national governments are already committed under the Paris agreement. However,aviation is now engaged in a discussion about how to comply with its pledges. The shipping industry, in contrast, remains unsure about whether it wants to commit to curbing its emissions at all – even though the IMO’s own estimates suggest shipping emissions will rise by 250 percent by 2050 and could by then make up 17 percent of all global emissions.
Carbon emissions standards on individual new ships that will be introduced from 2019 will reduce emissions per ton of cargo. But the IMO has no plans to extend the standards to existing shipping or to impose caps on the industry’s overall emissions.
Last September, the IMO’s then-secretary general Koji Sekimizu said shipping emissions should not be capped because to do so could damage economic growth. “Such measures would artificially limit the ability of shipping to meet the demand created by the world economy, or would unbalance the level playing field that the shipping industry needs for efficient operation, and therefore must be avoided,” he said.In April, the IMO’s environment committee sat down to discuss the matter, coincidentally on the same day that 175 nations met at the UN in New York to sign the Paris agreement. But rather than seizing the moment, the committee’s sole concession to the clamor for action was to agree to require all ships weighing more than 5,000 tons to submit data on fuel use.
“there needs to be a mandatory incentive with global targets.Shipping and aviation are in a similar situation today.If left unchecked, their greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise exponentially by 2050. So far, both have failed to implement meaningful measures.” Yet while aviation seems to be facing up to the challenges of a carbon-constrained world, shipping looks like the last holdout”
