A Climate Emergency Campaign to Get Ships Off Fossil Fuels

We have only 10 years to transition the economy off fossil fuels to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. While many campaigns are rightly challenging coal power, auto emissions, and other fossil fuel users, a critically neglected sector, thus far, has been global shipping. That sector produces huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and is ripe for transformation with a relatively modest amount of philanthropic input.

If shipping were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) worldwide. The industry operates largely out of sight of the public; faces little pressure on climate emissions; and receives few incentives (or penalties) from governments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite mounting evidence of the harms caused by shipping’s reliance on fossil fuels, the industry has largely resisted GHG reduction—and, the climate movement has largely ignored shipping as a campaign target.

Pacific Environment is working to change this. We have launched a campaign combining people power, market-based, and policy-focused strategies, seeking to meet the 1.5 degree centigrade target of the Paris Climate Agreement. Our campaign is focused on three targets, which together will create the pressure and conditions to rapidly decarbonize the industry.

Corporations: Mobilizing companies to achieve zero-emission shipping in their supply chains. Multinational companies like Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Coca-Cola play a major role in moving goods through shipping supply chains. These companies have the collective clout to force the shipping industry to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, its GHG emissions. This campaign deploys well-proven strategies to create public pressure for zero-emission shipping and trade. Demands by large corporate customers for clean shipping will create strong directional momentum within the market, forcing ship owners, investors, insurers and builders to do what it takes to get zero-emission vessels commercially viable and on sea by 2030. A major campaign benchmark of success will be that it becomes widely accepted that zero-emission shipping is an essential part of any good corporate citizen’s supply chain.

Ports: Pressuring ports and their regulators to accelerate conditions conducive for zero-emission trade. While the shipping industry often evades national and international regulation, ships must abide by the rules and regulations established by the ports at which they dock. We will build broad public support by building a global coalition of green shipping ports, while focusing most resources on a small number of critical ports: A large percentage of GHG shipping emissions comes from cargo ships, which travel mostly between the world’s biggest ports. Most of these ports are in the Pacific Rim, where Pacific Environment has a long history of successful partnerships and clean energy campaigning. Pacific Environment’s Clean Ports Now Campaign will drive the passage and achievement of port policies to incentivize and, ultimately, require cargo ships using their ports to have zero emissions.

The UN’s Shipping Agency: Pressuring the most important international regulator of shipping to impose ambitious GHG-reduction timelines and targets. Pacific Environment is one of only a handful of environmental organizations with permanent consultative status at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN’s shipping agency. Environmental pressure helped push the IMO to adopt its first GHG-reduction plan, though we will need to be stronger and better resourced to turn that too-weak first move into regulations bold enough to really turn the industry away from fossil fuels to next-generation sources of clean propulsion.