http://e360.yale.edu/feature/reduce_co2_emissions_shipping_aviation_regulation_paris/2995/
19 May 2016: Analysis
After Paris, A Move to Rein In Emissions by Ships and Planes [ABRIDGED ARTICLE]
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.
By Fred Pearce. In the global effort to reduce carbon emissions, the aviation and shipping industries have been the most conspicuous outliers. Although these two sectors currently contribute 6 percent of all manmade CO2 emissions, they have managed to remain outside international control.
But in the wake of the historic United Nations climate agreement reached in Paris in December, the pressure is finally on to rein in these two big freeloaders. 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. According to a study by University College London’s Energy Institute, aviation and shipping are on target to increase their contributions to overall CO2 emissions from today’s 6 percent to 40 percent by 2050, even as emissions from other sectors are slashed. 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. Which nation should be responsible, say, for a flight from Mexico City to New York, or a container ship heading from Shanghai to Los Angeles? Should the emissions be logged with the country where the plane or ship departs, or where it arrives, or according to its national flag or legal jurisdiction, or where it takes on fuel, or according to who or what is on board?
But it hasn’t worked out like that. Those two agencies have spent most of the 24 years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in 1992 doing virtually nothing, while watching the emissions from aviation and shipping soar far faster than other industrial sectors.
And with shipping, the problem has been further complicated by international lines that registered their ships in nations with lax regulatory systems, known as “flags of convenience.” Two-thirds of the world’s ships are registered in small non-industrial countries such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands.
Projected share of global CO2 emissions from aviation and shipping.
With airlines responsible for 90 percent of aviation traffic backing the proposals, an agreement should be reached. But the shipping industry, according to observers after the IMO’s most recent environment committee meeting in April, remains in denial. The aviation industry was pushed into action by a plan drawn up by the European Union in 2012. It required airlines flying into European airports to, in effect, pay a tax on emissions by being required to subscribe to the EU’s existing emissions trading scheme and buy permits for the pollution they cause. The industry challenged the European plan under international law, which prohibits national taxes on international aviation. But, in return for the EU putting the plan on hold, the ICAO agreed to draw up its own proposals. The political pressure to push through an aviation emissions cap is growing. Without a deal, the EU has promised to revisit its trading-scheme plan. And President Obama, in a joint announcement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year, pledged to get an ICAO deal before he leaves office. Under the ICAO’s draft plan, aviation emissions will be capped at 2020 levels. Airlines will have to prevent any further increases in their emissions after that date. Any unavoidable increases will have to be offset, either by airlines trading emissions rights among themselves, or by investing in offset schemes such as reforestation or forest conservation to soak up the excess CO2. Current industry projections see aviation activity increasing between three- and four-fold by 2040, according to an analysis by Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in Washington, D.C. More efficient planes can reduce emissions slightly below that.
But Petsonk still expects annual emissions of CO2 from international aviation to be 7.8 billion tons higher in 2040 than today. That is an increase roughly equivalent to current U.S. national emissions from all activities.
One way out would be to convert planes to burning biofuels. If those crop-based fuels are sustainably produced, airlines could mark such flights as zero emitters. Virgin and Lufthansa have run commercial flights on biofuels, but they have yet to go mainstream. In any event, the carbon neutrality of biofuels is widely contested by environmental groups, and turning large areas of land over to their production could threaten food security in some countries. Last month, the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International all backed the offsetting option, urging aviation to puts its money into the U.N.’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program, which channels funds into conservation of forests as carbon sinks. These groups called this approach “essential” to meet the stabilization target. But not all environmental organizations agree. Some, including Greenpeace and a host of European NGOs, believe forest conservation offsets do little in practice to protect forests and are prone to fraud and double-counting, in which various organizations funding forest conservation each end up claiming the supposed carbon benefit. But at least 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.
While the EU and two of the three nations with the largest “flag of convenience” shipping fleets — Liberia and the Marshall Islands — backed drawing up plans to bring shipping into line on emissions curbs, they met fierce opposition. Russia, China, India, Brazil, and the third major flag of convenience state, Panama, all put up strong resistance to any idea of substantive talks on limiting emissions. This veto from big developing nations has angered some major players in the industry, including a group called the Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI), whose members include major shipping lines such as the Danish giant Maersk, cruise company Carnival, and big users of shipping such as Cargill, the commodities conglomerate. “The shipping industry cannot go to Morocco without a process for emissions reductions. It would simply be unacceptable,” Fischbacher told Yale Environment 360. “Not only would it damage the industry’s reputation, it would also run the risk of external regulators taking the matter into their own hands and circumnavigating the IMO.”
Despite the IMO’s reluctance, making big reductions in emissions from shipping is not that difficult. A lot could be done to improve the fuel efficiency of shipping. Maersk says that during the economic slump after 2008, when shipping fleets had huge surplus capacity, the company cut fuel use and CO2 emissions by 30 percent simply by telling the captains of its massive container ships to travel more slowly.
And the International Chamber of Shipping says better-designed engines, hulls, and propellers could cut emissions by a further 15-20 percent. Different fuels for ships could also make a big difference. Maersk has conducted trials with biofuels. Carnival recently ordered the world’s first cruise ship powered by liquefied natural gas. And engineers are working on designs for ships powered by the sun or even a return to sails. But Fischbacher says for these innovations to be widely adopted, “there needs to be a mandatory incentive with global targets.” “Shipping and aviation are in a similar situation today,” he says. “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.