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.
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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.
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
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