In conversation with Christiana Figueres

No time to waste

The recent MEPC75 meeting was “deeply disappointing”, the architect of the Paris Climate Agreement Christiana Figueres told P&H during a conversation with IAPH managing director Patrick Verhoeven. However, there is still cause for optimism in the fight against maritime emissions

INES NASTALI

Five years after the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, P&H has caught up with the architect of the agreement. Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and an internationally recognized leader on climate change.

She was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016.

During her tenure at the UNFCCC, Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions, and non governmental organizations (NGO) to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 195 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to well below 2°C and strive for 1.5°C to protect the most vulnerable. For this achievement, Figueres has been credited with forging anew brand of collaborative diplomacy and received multiple awards.

Famously, the shipping industry is not specifically mentioned in the climate agreement as governments are called to support a clean transport industry instead.

However, the IMO is tasked with regulating the maritime industry and following the Marine Environment Protection Committee(MEPC75) meeting, which took place in November 2020,the implementation of the initial IMO Greenhouse Gas strategy was met with substantial criticism. The strategy demands to reduce shipping’s carbon footprint by 2050 by 50% compared to 2008 levels.

NGOs, such as the Clean Arctic Alliance and Transport and Environment, criticized that new short-term measures agreed in November are not sufficient to reach this goal. They said, the lack of ambition and carbon intensity targets agreed in November would not let emissions peak as soon as possible but allow for a weakened energy efficiency index of ships. This could instead lead to a 15% increase of emissions by the end of the decade, according to data analysis by Forbes.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change therefore recommends halving emissions by 2030 to keep in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. In December, UN secretary-general António Guterres also implicitly voiced disappointment in his own agency. “Current policies are not in line with the pledges made by the Getting to Zero Coalition. We need to see enforceable regulatory and fiscal steps so that the shipping industry can deliver its commitments. Otherwise, the net zero ship will have sailed,” he said.

“I was also deeply disappointed,” Figueres commented. Instead of sending a strong message of commitment, the adopted revision, “has no carbon intensity targets but loopholes for non-compliant ships,” she told P&H.

This is an excerpt of the Jan/Feb 2021 edition of P&H. To read the full article, subscribe to the magazine.

Image credit: FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP via GettyImages