Environmental lobby group Ocean Rebellion held a protest outside the International Maritime Organization in London, demanding that governments agree to halve shipping’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The call comes as delegates sit down for a week of discussions to draw up a draft agreement on revising the IMO’s decarbonisation targets. The agreement will be rubber-stamped by the regulator’s environmental committee next week.
The demonstration involved a mock ship flying the flags of countries opposing the target, including Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
A giant flaming Molotov oil drum, which Ocean Rebellion said represented the carbon bomb the IMO is planting, was also rolled out.
Ocean Rebellion’s Clive Russell said: “This is an emergency. Our greenhouse gas emissions are setting off a chain of events tipping our environment and societies towards climate chaos.
“Every moment we fail to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and commodities, we threaten the resilience of nature. With every day we fail to act, we approach dangerous tipping points with cascading knock-on impacts. There’s no time to waste, we must act now.”
Ocean Rebellion said its demands are achievable and are in line with the reductions that are required from shipping to meet the targets laid out in the United Nations’ Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
The calls from Ocean Rebellion are roughly in line with proposals on the table at the IMO from the UK, US, Canada and other states, which want to see greenhouse gases on a life-cycle basis cut by 37% by 2030 and 96% by 2040, compared with 2008.
A recent study by CE Delft concluded that shipping could achieve a 28% to 47% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030.
Emissions reductions in 2030 and 2040 have been proposed as intermediary targets as the IMO moves towards setting the goal of achieving zero, or net-zero, emissions by 2050.
Ahead of this week’s meeting, IMO secretary general Kitack Lim urged member states to “be ambitious and bold” in setting new decarbonisation targets.
