To enable the green transition of the maritime transport industry it is necessary to strengthen the skills and economic envelope of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations agency responsible for defining the measures necessary to improve the safety of international shipping and to mitigate the pollution caused by ships. Researchers at the Danish University of Copenhagen and Sweden's Lund University have picked up on a study that highlights how the IMO is an organisation without the necessary push and how it makes it an international body. of regulation devoid of the ability to be forward-looking and unable to handle new types of naval fuels and other technologies, such as batteries and wind-assisted propulsion techniques. According to the researchers, this means that "IMO is actively helping to make sure that the shipping industry is far from achieving its climate goals."

In view of the crucial eighteenth session of the IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), scheduled from 3 to July 7 next in London, in the course of which an update of the IMO's strategy for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions produced by ships, while also defining a range of technical and economic measures that are suitable to direct sea transport on the road to emission decrease, by Professor Teis Hansen from the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen, noted that " more ambitious climate goals go well. But the problem is that the IMO does not even have the policy tools necessary to achieve its previously set goals. Therefore, we need to understand why the IMO has so little success in this field. Because if nothing is accessed, this huge industry will represent an ever-increasing share of the global CO2 emissions. "

To understand Hansen and researcher Hanna Bach from the University of Lund, they carried out the study examining how the standards were developed at the IMO and interviewing employees of the U.N. agency and representatives of different parts of the world. interested. " Our research shows that in the course of the history of the IMO, the focus has been only on pre-existing technologies. In other words, they simply regulate the fuels already used by the industry. In this way, it rules retroactively. At the same time, IMO does not have a regulation that directly promotes the use of more sustainable fuels, which is what we need. "

Moreover, according to the researchers, the IMO's aim to reduce air pollution caused by ships, which consists mainly of sulphur emissions and nitrogen oxides, has pushed development in the wrong direction : " so far-it has specified Hansen-the IMO has focused on air pollution instead of greenhouse gases. This has created an unbalanced legal framework, which in practice has meant legalizing the industry to fossil fuels. " Hansen, like other researchers and various environmental organisations, has put the focus on resorting to liquefied natural gas as a naval fuel, an appeal that has positive lapses but also presents another side of the coin : " with the current regulation-said Teis Hansen-the IMO promotes liquefied natural gas as marine fuel because it can reduce emissions of sulphur and nitrogen. However, the use of LNG has contributed to a 150% increase in methane emissions, a figure that will increase because an ever-increasing number of ships with liquefied natural gas-powered propulsion are ordered. In this way, the IMO is working against its own policy objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "

Researchers at Danish and Swedish universities have also placed an emphasis on the few resources made available to the International Maritime Organization observing that currently only around 300 people are employed at the London-based headquarters of the organization and that this corresponds to about 5% of the employees of a medium-sized Danish municipality. "The secretariat needs more resources, both in terms of a more substantial workforce and in administering other types of policy instruments than it does today," Bach said. This could include a global carbon tax, a global fund to support the transition to green fuels and other types of financial support to promote the use of green technologies. "

In addition to an organic shortage, the IMO said the IMO would also suffer from the lack of staff with the right experience : "We have interviewed an IMO official who has said :" We don't have the ability to follow all of the different technologies and we don't have the ability to make good financial decisions in terms of what to support and what not to support. " "This is incredible," Hansen said.

There would be, for researchers, also other reasons why-in their words-IMO would be "so reluctant to move towards a more" green "road" and summarized them in two articles published in the magazines "Environmental Innovation" and " Societal Transitions and Marine Policy " that highlight how the IMO suffers from a lack of political consensus among the 175 member states that join the organization as well as a unclear mandate. "There are Member States who ask whether the implementation of instruments such as a global carbon tax actually falls within the mandate of the IMO, or whether it conflicts with national legislation," Bach said. At every good account, the IMO Secretariat has not been able to provide a clear answer on this. Therefore this is constantly the subject of debate, which takes a long time and blocks the negotiations when it comes to implementing new policy instruments. " "History shows that we cannot simply rely on the same IMO to regulate this matter in a way that follows its own path," said Hansen. To ensure that, we need to assess whether we can strengthen the IMO by organizing the institution in a better way. "