BIMCO believes that before governments can establish realistic targets for the reduction of CO2 as related to the shipping industry, governments must compile reliable data that supports such targets.
In support of this undertaking, BIMCO will in principle support a scheme that strives to collect reliable data regarding CO2 emissions from ships engaged in international trade, provided that such a scheme does not place an unnecessary and additional administrative as well as operational burden on the ships and thus potentially impact the safe operation of ships.
In line with BIMCO’s objective to facilitate international trade in a fair and non-discriminatory manner the MRV dataset should be as simple as possible to facilitate international implementation and preferably by use of data monitored and collected by means of existing procedures on board the ships.
BIMCO thus sees any possible MRV scheme of data collection as a vehicle by which the industry may contribute to deliver data for governments to facilitate their setting of realistic targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions from ships.
BIMCO thus sees any possible MRV scheme of data collection as a vehicle by which the industry may contribute to deliver data for governments to facilitate their setting of realistic targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions from ships.
Background
In the autumn of 2012 the European Commission (EC) communicated its intentions with regard to actions towards GHG emissions from ships. Its initial approach is a MRV (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification) scheme. The EC will release its proposal during the first half of 2013 and the normal EU processes for translating an EC initiative into European law will take some years. Mandatory requirements on ships calling in Europe will thus likely become a reality some years later.
The USA has submitted a proposal to MEPC for a three phase scheme to ultimately result in a regulatory requirement for existing ships’ energy efficiency. The first phase is proposing a data collection scheme to be used for subsequent analysis in a second phase – potentially leading to the development of an energy efficiency baseline for existing ships. The suggested third phase is implementation of some kind of mandatory requirement to efficiency and a potential trading scheme to allow for alternative compliance.