The wake viewed off the RMS St Helena, January 2018. Photo © Penny Urquhart
Standing on the deck of the RMS St Helena, miles of Atlantic Ocean all around, I felt loathe to connect with the downside of this dreamy way of travelling. Five nights on the ship, sadly now decommissioned, from Cape Town to the island of St Helena and the stress of everyday life drops right off you and down, down to the unimaginable fathoms below the ship. Your eyes are soothed by the hues of blue all around – not a speck of land to be seen, nor even another ship. Your body adjusts to the gentle rolling of the ship, and your ears attune to the throb of the engines powering you from below. You breathe in fresh clean marine air – with just the odd whiff of the ship’s fuel from the yellow stack above. Ah, there’s the rub – the bunker oil.
Ships burn different types of this: broadly speaking, there is Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO), Low Sulphur Fuel Oil (LSFO), and diesel oil. Different regulations apply in different regions for what is permissible – for example, in EU waters, LSFO is required, mainly to reduce more localised pollution and health problems. But cargo ships on the high seas typically burn large amounts of HFO, the heavy, residual oil left over after gasoline, diesel and other light hydrocarbons are refined from crude oil.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), HFO currently accounts for 84% of the marine bunkers fuel mix. Viscous, dirty and cheap, it has a higher carbon footprint than lighter oils. HFO is also very difficult to recover once spilled, has a high sulphur content (read: acid rain and respiratory diseases), and when burned it emits black carbon, a potent pollutant that accelerates climate change.
Apart from greenhouse gases (GHGs), HFO is so dirty that it has serious health impacts. A 2007 global assessment indicated that shipping-related particulate emissions lead to approximately 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths annually, with most deaths occurring near coastlines in Europe, East Asia, and South Asia. The study estimated that as shipping grew, deaths could increase by 40% by 2012. We have passed that date, and shipping is most certainly still growing, but I could not find an updated global assessment. However, a 2016 study of health and climate consequences of shipping emissions in East Asia found that they resulted in “substantial adverse health impacts”, in the order of 14,500–37,500 premature deaths per year.
The International Maritime Organisation, the UN regulatory body on shipping, has been roundly criticised for evading the needed changes in the regulatory regime to reduce GHGs from shipping. Emissions would need to halve by 2050 for a 2C pathway, the upper limit of the Paris Agreement, but instead are growing substantially – between 2013 and 2015, shipping emissions grew by 2.4%. NGOs have been campaigning for years against the sector’s recalcitrance. In the more measured tones of the International Energy Agency (IEA), “limited policy deployments have led to a slow uptake of clean technologies in shipping. Meeting 2 degrees goals requires the rapid adoption of markedly more ambitious policies”.
On the positive side, polluting sulphur emissions have been reduced, thanks to IMO regulations. But in October 2016, the organisation delayed putting in place steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until 2023. Too late, cried the watchdogs. Although shipping’s contribution to global GHG emissions is increasing, and may reach 10% or more by 2050, the industry was not included in the 2015 Paris Agreement. As the group Transport and Environment and others have pointed out, international shipping is not playing its role in the necessary transition to a low-carbon society. Emissions from aviation and shipping, which are growing at an annual rate of 3-5%, must peak in the very near future to have a chance of meeting the Paris climate goals.
The IMO did approve an Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) in 2011, which applies to almost all new ships built from 2015. More efficient ships mean less GHG emissions per nautical mile. However, as a recent study by CE Delft found, ships built in the 2000s were actually less efficient than those built in the 1990s – so the first period of the EEDI will really just be about reversing that decline. As the CE Delft study points out, the result could be an effective 30-year stagnation of shipping energy efficiency, unless more ambitious targets are adopted. This would not be good for the climate.
But ordinary seafarers are not the enemy. As Michael Gibson, Second Officer on the RMS St Helena told me, “there’s a disconnect between what the public thinks seafarers care about the environment, and how we actually feel – our number two priority is always protection of the environment. And nobody’s wanting to actually deliberately pollute or use a bad fuel, because we also have to go back to our homes, which are a lot of times in vulnerable coastal areas”.
As Michael says, “not a lot of people understand even the basic things about shipping. Especially for Britain, which is a big seafaring nation, very few people actually know that 95% of their goods comes by ship. We don’t make all that much in the UK, a lot of freight’s going to and fro … I think if there did happen to be a strike, or if the ports did close, people would notice it immediately, and they would appreciate what exactly goes into getting their stuff to the UK.” So it’s particularly galling to be painted as a ‘baddie’, or as part of a polluting industry, when in actual fact shipping underpins trade in a lot of the things that people love in the modern world.
Michael mentions how mariners tend to be automatically criminalised if there is an accident, a kind-of Costa Concordia situation. But in fact the officer in question may have very skilfully avoided a major catastrophe, as was the case in 2015 for the 51,000-ton Hoegh Osaka car carrier, which was deliberately run aground on The Brambles sandbank off Southampton to save the ship from capsizing after it had developed a severe list. And it is particularly hurtful when all the public can think of in the case of a tanker accident is environmental damage, significant as that may be, with no thought for the lives of the men and women aboard – as for the recent Iranian tanker fire in which the lives of all 32 crew aboard were lost.
Second officer Michael Gibson on the bridge of the RMS St Helena Photo © Penny Urquhart
But although seafarers like Michael Gibson do care about the effects of their industry on the environment, and see the necessity of reducing shipping’s impact on climate change, the perception is that many companies only see the economic bottom line. As Michael says, “there’s very much an awareness amongst seafarers of climate change, but in certain cases it’s almost like your hands are tied. We don’t decide the fuel we carry, the company goes right, these are the fuels we are legally allowed to use, and more often than not they will go for the cheapest one.”
We also spoke about the impact of climate change on shipping, which carries around 90% by volume of all goods traded globally. Michael points out that while environmental protection is taken very seriously and is in fact the second priority of seafarers, climate change itself is not so much emphasised – “the only time you probably really discuss climate change as such is when there are massive waves crashing over the hull”.
The UK-based Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership states that climate change’s effects on the commercial sea services will be significant: sea-level rise, coastal flooding and storms and waves will affect ports, shipping and built structures, not to mention impacts on fisheries and marine ecosystems. Major risks to ports are likely to arise from flooding and physical damage associated with sea-level rise and severe storms. Then of course there is the opening up of the Arctic for shipping, and talks of mining in our last great wildernesses – but that is the topic of another blog.
How will stronger storms and bigger waves affect our main shipping routes? There is a dearth of targeted academic studies on particular shipping lanes, but future changes in wind speed and storm incidence could lead to reduced loads, route changes and restrictions for some ships. Increased storminess on some routes would increase costs through longer diversionary routes, more safety measures and higher maintenance costs. There is anecdotal evidence that the Irish Sea has become a lot rougher in recent decades. A Finnish climate analysis shows there could be gains and losses linked to the shorter ice season in the Baltic Sea. It may lower the operating costs of ports, but make seafaring more dangerous through strong westerly and south-westerly winds that may cause pack ice to form in certain areas, hindering and slowing down shipping.
A recent North Atlantic storm had significant wave heights of 19 metres, unheard of in that part of the sea, which posed extreme danger to vessels near one of the main shipping lanes connecting north Europe, Mediterranean ports, and US east coast and Gulf ports. Significant wave height is the average height of the tallest one-third of waves (from trough to crest), so individual waves are likely to be far bigger. This storm was in all likelihood linked to climate change – while it can be hard to specifically link an isolated event to global warming, meteorologist Eric Holthaus has pointed out that every single event that happens in our modified warmer world is happening the way it is because of human-induced warming.
The knock-on effects of climate change impacts on shipping can be severe: a recent study identifying ‘chokepoints’ in the global food supply that are increasingly at risk under climate change included ports and other maritime blockage points such as the Straits of Gibraltar, the Strait of Malacca, and the Suez Canal, which would affect trade along major shipping routes. As Laura Wellesley, one of the report authors, explains “Food-insecure, low-income countries will be the hardest hit by droughts and floods and extreme weather that will destroy crops. That means that import dependence on our basic food supply is rising. That means that the importance of trade is rising. That means the importance of chokepoints is rising.” Risks may be greatest for regions with growing populations and severe projected climate impacts, such as most of Africa and the Middle East. Some countries could become almost totally dependent on imports by 2050, with severe consequences if one of the chokepoints on which they depend for wheat imports, for example, becomes inoperational due to extreme weather. In some cases, there are no viable alternatives for chokepoints.
There are signs of renewed progress on reduction of GHGs from shipping – the IMO has reportedly begun to talk more about ‘decarbonisation’ of shipping. Apart from incentivising greater efficiency, more transparency will be needed on monitoring, reporting and verifying these steps. It does seem hard to believe, given the urgency for action on cutting GHGs, that the IMO only began to draft an initial GHG Strategy at a meeting held in October 2017 – as clearly the steps taken to date have not been enough.
But politics has come into play, and some of the emerging economies have been stymying a shipping deal. It might have something to do with the influence of the aptly named ‘FOCs’ – Flags of Convenience – that are reported to have captured the precursor to the IMO, the IMCO. These registry businesses – such as Panama and Liberia – make up more than half of the world’s merchant fleet and frequently lead national delegations to the IMO. Their interests do not appear to be congruent with averting a planetary crisis.
However, pressure is increasing on the IMO to do the right thing. The One Planet Summit held in December 2017, on the second anniversary of the Paris Agreement, reiterated the need for strong commitment to reducing GHGs from shipping through the “Tony de Brum Declaration”, named after the late Marshall Islands Foreign Minister and campaigner for climate action at the IMO, and a reduced influence for the registry businesses.
Some big players want to do more: the Sustainable Shipping Initiative, which includes Maersk Line, China Navigation Company and Cargill, have called for a 20% efficiency improvement per decade, exceeding the current required 10% for new ships. And agreement on an initial Comprehensive IMO Strategy on Reduction of GHG Emissions from Ships is expected in April 2018, with a revised strategy in 2023. Short-term interventions include ‘slow steaming’ – reducing the speed of the ship to reduce GHG emissions. The IEA notes that in the near and medium term, advanced biofuels would need to play a role and in the long term, hydrogen could be directly used for shipping – or as an intermediate product for synthetic fuels.
The new shipping and climate strategy will need to be ambitious – according to the IMO itself, shipping’s carbon footprint will grow 50- 250% by 2050 without intervention. This the world cannot afford, if we are to have any hope of holding global mean temperature increase to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels – or even to the 2° C that is the planned upper limit in the Paris Agreement.