Shipping Emissions Underestimated

Until now, the UN's Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated shipping emissions to be a maximum 400 million tons. New report relies on IMO measures But the new draft report by a group of international scientists is a more sophisticated measure, using data collected from the oil and shipping industries for the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the UN agency tasked with monitoring pollution from ships, the paper reported. The draft report not only shows emissions are much worse than feared, but warns CO2 emissions are set to rise by a further 30 percent by 2020, the Guardian quotes the leaked document as saying. "This is a clear failure of the system. The shipping industry has so far escaped publicity. It has been left out of the climate change discussion,” said IPCC chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, when contacted by reporters about the leaked draft report. “I hope (shipping emissions) will be included in the next UN agreement. It would be a cop-out if it were not. It tells me that we have been ineffective at tackling climate change so far." The figure cited in the leaked report is a source of embarrassment for the four governments – including Great Britain – which paid for it. Various EU nations have minimised the impact of the shipping industry on the global climate, underestimating it as being responsible for some 2 percent of worldwide emissions. . . . http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2008/shipping_emissions

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