SAVE US FROM THE IGNORANT

Sean Moloney

Ship Management International

Issue 22 – Nov/Dec. 2009

By the time you will be reading this, shipping's future may have already been decided at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). The extent to which shipping is praised or vilified will be for the negotiators and diplomats to determine and the extent to which the industry, through the work of the International Maritime Organisation, will be allowed to determine its future over greenhouse gases (GHG) will also be seen.

The shipping industry, unsurprisingly, is fully behind the IMO as the only body able to regulate GHG emissions from ships and it fully supports the IMO process to develop real and sustainable GHG emission reduction regulations from ships that will not hinder international commerce. There is also a strong principle that GHG regulations should be ship and flag neutral.

In its recently published policy statement on GHG emissions from shipping, the tanker owning body INTERTANKO said it recognised the importance of working with other stake-holders to ensure the maximum efficiency of both new ships and existing ships. It also believed that short and long-term target levels for GHG emission reductions from ships should be ambitious but realistic, and provide incentives for sustainably achieving them.

As this industry is always telling itself, shipping is the most environmentally-friendly transport mode there is and should be recognised as such. My only concern as we enter the COP15 discussions, is whether shipping has done enough to convince the global community of the worth of its green credentials?

Difficult to say, but what is easy to comment on is the complete drivel that seeped from the uneducated and uniformed pens of the Daily Mail journalists writing just three weeks before COP15 about shipping's bad environmental and economic record. Headlines such as "How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world" and "Sharks off the British coast: Oil tankers refuse to unload until prices rise... keeping YOUR fuel costs soaring" vied for prominence with such ridiculous in-text commentary as "...the super-ships are rogues on the high seas, operating under pollution standards long since banished on land, warming the planet and killing its inhabitants".

This anti-shipping propaganda is appalling and has to be tackled at source. The shipping industry has no choice but to act to improve its image. If it is to come under the general media spotlight, then action needs to be taken and this has to be industry-wide. It is too late to sit tight and hope the world realises the important role shipping plays. That message has to be thrown strong and hard back at the naysayers who ridicule the effort shipping undertakes to ensure trade continues, in whatever form.

Both InterManager and INTERTANKO have called for greater industry-wide cooperation on issues that affect them both. Indeed, InterManager will be attending its first Round Table (of Shipping Associations) meeting in mid-December (albeit as an invited guest) to discuss issues of common interest and its inclusion is welcomed, there is no doubt about that. But this must be the start.

The shipping industry has to start speaking as one voice on all issues and its voice must cross vessel, industry sector and geographic boundaries. It must educate the regulators, it must further educate the indoctrinated and it must inform the ignorant. If we are proud of our shipping industry then we have to stand up and be counted as an industry.

If the world wants transparency it must get it, warts and all. But with all that honesty and openness, must come an understanding of the pressures facing shipping. And just as a hard-hitting report from the Tokyo-based Ocean Policy Research Foundation think-tank warns about a potential 364,000 shortage in seafarers by 2050, the stakes are clearly getting higher.