After pressure from Chinese and Indian negotiators, an attempt led by the European Union to reveal how much pollution each of the world’s ships is pumping into the atmosphere has failed.
Governments agreed on Thursday during talks at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London, to anonymise data on the carbon intensity of ships’ fuels and their emissions so that businesses and the wider public cannot use it to identify individual vessels.
While the public will only be given rough figures on each ship’s emissions – without being told names – governments will be given access to the full uncensored data.
This compromise comes after China and India opposed full transparency at the talks, arguing on Monday that this information was commercially sensitive and would confuse the public.
Negotiations at the IMO this week are tasked more broadly with putting in place a system to shift the international shipping sector to greener fuels and reduce its emissions, which account for around 3% of the global total.
Climate campaigners, the EU and sections of the maritime industry argued that the public have a right to know how polluting the ships plying their coastlines and docking at their ports are – and that letting environmentally-conscious shippers choose cleaner vessels would help clean up the maritime industry’s emissions.
Governments set to agree fees for ships that miss green targets
Lucy Gillam, who runs an NGO called One Planet Port Rotterdam, based in the Dutch city that hosts Europe’s biggest port, said Rotterdam’s residents “deserve to know which vessels are polluting our air and threatening our health”.
“Public access to carbon intensity data isn’t a luxury, it’s a right – one that all port city communities should have,” she added. A 2018 study found that ships’ emissions lead to heart disease and lung cancers which kill around 400,000 people a year prematurely, particularly in China and Northern Europe.
Data collection system
In October 2016, governments agreed that all but the smallest ships should record details of how much fuel oil they consume and report this information to the IMO, the UN’s shipping arm.
Ship operators started collecting this data in 2019, and since 2023, it has been used to calculate how polluting ships are, with a rating known as a “carbon intensity indicator”.
These ratings are not made public, and even governments only have access to them in anonymised form so that the ships cannot be identified.
In 2022, the EU and Norway submitted a proposal that “with the sole purpose to continue stimulating [greenhouse gas] emission reduction activities”, the information should be available to the public in a non-anonymised form.
Hopes fade for climate cash from carbon price on shipping
More transparency, they argued, would allow incentive schemes for ships with the best ratings and would “increase the credibility of the industry”.
They noted that the EU collects and publishes similar data for European shipping under its THETIS-MRV programme “without any reported negative impact to shipping companies and respective maritime operations”.
Industry support
An observer of the IMO environmental talks, who did not want to be named, said the EU’s push for transparency had been supported by Australia and Canada, and the US under the Biden administration, but opposed by China and India.
The World Shipping Council and the Global Shippers Forum (GSF), bodies that represent companies which operate ships and those which transport goods by sea respectively, also supported the EU proposal.
The head of the GSF, James Hookham, said in 2020 that “importing and exporting businesses with strong environmental principles and their own carbon-neutral targets will expect and demand full visibility of a vessel’s energy efficiency rating”.
The Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance – whose members include global brands Amazon, IKEA and Patagonia – also support more transparency. Its CEO Ingrid Irigoyen wrote to the head of the IMO in March saying that “transparency and accessibility must improve, enabling all stakeholders, including freight buyers, access to credible maritime emissions data” as “opaque and flawed reporting could significantly undermine the trust of key maritime stakeholders”.
Commercial sensitivity
On Monday, China’s delegate – who cannot be named in line with IMO rules – told the talks in London that making pollution data public “will undermine the protection of such sensitive information and introduce a risk of its commercial exploitation”.
He added that the shipping companies had not consented to having their emissions levels published and “at this stage, there is no need to open the data to the public”.
Beyond anxiety: Teens’ mental health suffers on Africa’s climate frontlines
An Indian delegate added that he shared China’s concerns. The ratings are a “work in progress and if we export it to the public – even if anonymised data – it can lead to confusion and public can get wrong impression about it,” he argued.
After further talks, which were closed to the press, countries agreed to make only anonymised data available to the public and to make the full data available to governments. Currently, governments can only see anonymous data and the public cannot see any specific data.
These changes will have to go through legal processes and are likely to be enacted from 2027 onwards. The official report on the talks said these reforms were supported by an “overwhelming majority”.
But governments also agreed to submit proposals to a future set of talks “on strengthening the anonymisation provisions” in order to “ensure that the identification of a specific ship will not be possible”.
