Marine Shipping
From 2005 until 2008, when the representative nations of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) met to revise the 1997 treaty that contained the first international regulation of air pollution from ships, CATF was there as the main technical representative of the world NGO environmental community. These negotiations were much informed by CATF’s 2007 commissioning of an independent study which demonstrated that particulate air pollution from oceangoing ships causes a staggering 60,000 premature deaths per year around the world, a number projected to grow steadily along with world trade and shipping traffic. CATF also commissioned and presented to the IMO a follow-up study showing that aggressive action by the IMO to reduce shipping air pollution (action similar to what IMO ended up taking), could reduce the estimated annual premature death toll from international shipping by more than 50%.
Thanks in large measure to these studies and to the attention they received during the IMO negotiations, IMO finalized in 2008 the first meaningful standards for air pollution from international shipping. These standards will require:
- Sulfur oxide reductions of more than 90% in designated geographic areas near coastal and port areas by 2015, and about 80% globally by 2020; and
- Nitrogen oxide reductions of about 80% from new ships in designated geographic areas near coastal and port areas by 2016, and about 20% globally by 2011; nitrogen oxide emissions from certain larger existing ships will also be reduced by about 15-20% beginning in 2010.
Because earlier and deeper reductions are applicable under the new IMO rules only in designated coastal areas, CATF urged the United States and other progressive countries to designate their coastlines as “emission control areas.” In 2009, the US and Canada submitted a joint proposal to IMO to designate most North American coastal waters out to 200 miles as such an area. And in March of this year the IMO formally adopted the US-Canadian proposal—an action that will save up to 31,000 lives per year.
To inform the IMO’s negotiation and technical study process, CATF provided detailed information and policy comments throughout and helped sway IMO decision making.
In addition to working with the IMO, CATF has also worked to convince the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board to move forward with their shipping emissions regulations. Over the past few years, CARB promulgated regulations to reduce particulate emissions from auxiliary and main diesel engines on ocean-going ships, as well as diesel engines on smaller inland and coastal boats. For its part, EPA has promulgated strict new air pollution limits for new inland and coastal marine diesel engines, and last year finalized regulations to tighten limits on ocean-going ships sailing within the designated US emission control area.
As the focus of IMO’s work has shifted from air pollution to climate change, CATF is striving to bring attention to the climate impacts of shipping emissions of black carbon in the Arctic and near-Arctic regions. Preliminary results provided by our atmospheric modeling work give us enough confidence that there are benefits to advocating before IMO for BC controls on ships. In this connection, we strongly support the recent submission to the IMO by the United States, Norway, and Sweden to consider reductions of black carbon emissions from shipping. At the same time, we recognize that important research questions remain, and we intend to use new shipping inventories to support more precise modeling of the climate impacts on the Arctic of black carbon emissions from shipping.
