The EU's new Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) rules require the European Commission to collect and publish annual data on each registered ship's performance, including average fuel consumption per cargo tonne-mile and total fuel consumption for the year.
"The industry has made clear its total opposition to the publication of data about individual ships using abstract operational efficiency metrics that bear no relation to CO2 emissions in real life and which will be used to penalize shipowners unfairly," said ICS chairman Esben Poulsson in a statement Monday. "Anything less than a full alignment [of the MRV] with the IMO CO2 data collection system will be seen as a sign of bad faith by many non-EU nations who recently agreed to the IMO GHG reduction strategy, precisely to discourage such unilateral measures."
ICS asserts that regional regulations on CO2 would have a distortionary effect on shipping markets, with negative effects for shipowners. In the run-up to the vote at the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee's last meeting, ICS raised the possibility that the EU would step in to regulate shipping on its own in order to urge member states to compromise on an IMO plan.
The IMO's agreed global targets for decarbonization — to cut the sector’s total greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, regardless of demand growth, and to reduce CO2 output per unit of transport work by 70 percent — adhered closely to the ICS-preferred option. During negotiations, the EU, the Marshall Islands and many environmental groups called for more ambitious cuts, up to and including full decarbonization by mid-century.
