The UN International Maritime Organisation (IMO) have confirmed in their Second Report on Greenhouse Gas Emissions (2009) that approximately 3.3% of global CO2 emissions come from international shipping. This compares with only 2.4% from aviation, which has been the subject of considerably more scrutiny and therefore has had a much higher public profile than shipping emissions.
The House of Commons Environmental Audit Select Committee recently published a report (June 2009) which was highly critical of the progress being made by the UK government both in making allowances within the UK’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets for UK shipping emissions and in persuading the international community, through IMO, to take constructive action to begin to bear down on these emissions.
The Audit Committee has recommended that the UK government should “...identify where [its] support could help British researchers, designers and shipyards to become global leaders in technologies that can be applied worldwide. We recommend that particular attention should be paid to technologies that can be retrofitted to existing ships, as this could have the biggest impact in the short-to-medium term.”
