A European Commission proposal requiring ships sailing in European Union waters to monitor, report and verify their CO2 emissions is close to being finalised. 

It would require ships over 5,000 gross tonnes to begin reporting from 2017, according to a draft proposal. Ships would have to report all emissions emitted since their last port of call before entering EU waters, or their first port of call after exiting the EU. The reporting would have to be verified by a third party and sent to the European Maritime Safety Agency.

The Commission has not ruled out eventually making shipping emissions subject to the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) or to a different market-based mechanism. Under the legislation setting up the ETS, the Commission should have proposed such a mechanism by the end of last year if no agreement had been reached at international level through the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).

However, in October the Commission announced it would not fulfil this obligation, and would give the IMO more time. Until such a deal is reached, the Commission will begin monitoring emissions. The EU’s inclusion of aviation in the ETS, which began on 1 January 2012, was frozen later in the year after non-EU countries said the EU should have waited for an international agreement through the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

Priorities

The IMO is thought to be several years away from agreeing an international market-based system for lowering shipping emissions, and talks are currently focusing on first developing a monitoring system. The United States has recently submitted a proposal for monitoring which is broadly in line with the EU’s thinking and which will be discussed at an IMO meeting next month.

Bill Hemmings, a campaigner with green transport group T&E, said that while it was now clear that the current Commission would not act to limit shipping emissions, the next Commission could revisit the issue. The monitoring proposal was a first step. “We’ll see how [the monitoring proposal] goes in the co-decision process,” he said. “The EU could add [a market-based mechanism] to it later.”

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