Maritime commerce and transport: The imperfect match between climate change and the International Maritime Organization

The chapter looks at maritime commerce and transport, in the process highlighting the imperfect match between the policies of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the challenges posed by climate change to the world’s oceans. As the principal regulator of international maritime transport, the IMO is an obvious venue for devising policies for addressing climate-related challenges for shipping. However, the IMO is not up to the task for a number of reasons. It has always advocated a staid approach to addressing environmental concerns related to shipping, relying, for example, on existing technologies rather than pushing members to adopt new ones. Although the IMO has called for improvements in the energy efficiency of ships, it has not embraced the decarbonisation of maritime transport. Indeed, greenhouse gas emissions from shipping continue to increase and even the IMO does not expect them to fall before 2050. Because the IMO has lacked initiative and consequently lacks legitimacy in this issue area, actions to limit climate-changing pollution from shipping have fallen to often-fragmented schemes implemented by regional organisations, ports and private actors.