Shipping-maritime industry is smoked out of the recently published draft of the NFCCC COP21 climate agreement, currently being negotiated in Paris.
The most recent draft of the agreement, released Wednesday, was without language regarding the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions from fuels used for ships and airplanes.
A previous December 5 draft of the agreement was reported to have included the wording "parties pursue the limitation or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation and marine bunker fuels."
That text was absent in the latest draft, but EU officials are understood to be amongst those pushing to re-introduce such language. The Paris Agreement is due to be finalised during the COP21 talks in Paris this week, the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In a posting on Twitter by Maersk the company’s head of positioning, risk management and climate change, group sustainability, John Kornerup Bang, said: “Shipping is out of the latest draft. We are disappointed and hope it will be reintroduced before COP21 ends.”
However, this omission does not mean shipping will definitely be spared from regulation as a result of COP 21.
The newest draft is 29 pages, while the draft from Saturday was 48 pages, and in the past when such dramatic reductions occurred, countries would often reinsert the portions they valued most, the BBC reported. With two more days of negotiations left, it is still possible the language in question resurfaces.
Officials from Europe, which has pushed particularly hard for a reference to the shipping and aviation sectors, said they hadn't given up.
"I don't know who got it out but we are fighting for it to be put back in," EU Energy and Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete told Reuters. He said not having shipping and aviation in the new text was a "a step backwards".
The absence of shipping from the latest draft deal is good news for the UN’s International Maritime Organization and shipping groups such as the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), who have supported the need for a global climate change deal but argue that the IMO is the best and only place for regulations and discussion on shipping’s contribution to global CO2 emissions.
Observers feel that maritime shipping emissions must be part of the global solution. This has been made clear in Paris with significant side events dedicated to shipping. Maritime shipping is the most used means of transport around the world. About 90% of all international exchanges go through maritime shipping. In 2014, about 10 billion tons of cargo were moved by sea.