UN maritime shipping agency sets net-zero goal for 2050

Countries belonging to the United Nations’s shipping agency reached an agreement Friday to reach net zero emissions from shipping by midcentury.

In the announcement, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said the deal will set a target of net zero by 2050 from shipping among its 175 countries, “taking into account different international circumstances.” Maritime shipping comprises about 3 percent of global carbon emissions.

The agreement is “not the end goal, [but] it is in many ways a starting point for the work that needs to intensify even more over the years and decades ahead of us,” IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim said in a statement. “However, with the Revised Strategy that you have now agreed on, we have a clear direction, a common vision, and ambitious targets to guide us to deliver what the world expects from us.”

The agreement was met with umbrage by marine conservation groups, who called it too little, too late and castigated the UN body for not setting hard emissions reduction targets for the end of this decade and the next. The Clean Shipping Coalition credited Pacific island nations, which are particularly vulnerable to climate change, for the goals in the final agreement, but called the target far less than what is necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold identified in the Paris Climate Agreement.

“There is no excuse for this wish and a prayer agreement. They knew what the science required, and that a 50 percent cut in emissions by 2030 was both possible and affordable. Instead the level of ambition agreed is far short of what is needed to be sure of keeping global heating below 1.5ºC and the language seemingly contrived to be vague and non-committal,” said John Maggs, president of the coalition, in a statement.

“The most vulnerable put up an admirable fight for high ambition and significantly improved the agreement but we are still a long way from the IMO treating the climate crisis with the urgency that it deserves and that the public demands,” he added.