High Seas Drifter

There’s nothing like a healthy dose of personal interest to focus the mind. And as I track a container holding my family’s possessions, en route from the UK to our new home in Wellington, New Zealand, I find myself suddenly, very personally reacquainting myself with the shipping trade.

It’s easy to forget, when living a land based life, that 90% of all international trade is actually transported by sea. From lingerie to liquid petroleum, it’s all out there somewhere in the vastness of the world’s oceans. And it’s all on its way to be bought and sold and used, re-used, recycled and discarded.

The scale of the shipping trade is truly enormous. There are about 4,000 container ships in service around the world at any time and each carries around 7,000 containers like mine on any given trip. One hundred and fifty million such containers are transported every year – that’s a lot of electrical appliances, plastic toys, clothes, sofas and personal possessions. But these ships, colossal, each and every one, correspond to just eight per cent of global shipping trade - the majority of trade coming from general cargo ships, bulk carriers and tankers (76%).

What I find inexplicable however is that at a time when news rooms worldwide are pouring out stories about the perils of climate change: from fish that are migrating to cooler waters due to warming oceans, or particular cities at a much greater risk of flooding due to previously unseen sea level rises, you’d think there’d be much more importance given to this industry’s emissions and its efforts at reduction. It’s a curious fact that the shipping industry seems to have largely escaped the plethora of international pressure to regulate its emissions, markedly having no targets to reach under the Kyoto Protocol.

Let’s face it; these beasts that take a mile to stop once they’re up and running are hardly the shrinking violets of the transport trade. Nor are they the oceans’ equivalent of the lean green (and very fashionable) Honda Prius. Of course, if they were they’d get a lot more attention. No, these ships suffer from ‘out of sight’ syndrome. We don’t hear them take off over us, they don’t clog up our streets and we rarely get rides on them. Only occasionally do we hear of one of them being taken by pirates, conjuring up an altogether ‘other place’ or, even rarer still, a report of some solo yachtsperson crashing into a stray container floating in the open ocean.

Organisations representing the shipping industry will only too happily tell you what a clean industry it is in comparison to both land and air transportation with greenhouse gas emissions per tonne-mile undeniably being far less. But the mere scale of the shipping trade makes it an industry that has a total global carbon output far higher than even the aviation industry, traditionally seen as the transport bad boy (3.5% compared to 2% of global carbon output). Even the industry admits that the shipping trade is likely to increase predicting that global shipbuilding will climb by 50 per cent by 2012 along, inevitably, with associated carbon emissions.

So as my container ship rounds the headland into Wellington Harbour in all its colossal glory, I wonder how long it will take before the regulation of shipping emissions finally finds it way onto the international radar* where both voluntary and regulatory steps can responsibly be taken towards making the shipping trade a truly green alternative to other modes of transportation.

*In February this year, the EU called for shipping targets to be included in the Kyoto successor which is due to be hammered out at the climate meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Global shipping facts obtained from: http://www.marisec.org/shipp...