Monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon dioxide emissions from ships

In the EU, there is comprehensive on-going work to develop and establish a system that ensures a uniform assessment and monitoring of carbon dioxide from sea transport. The work is carried out under the abbreviation MRV (monitoring, reporting and verification) where carbon dioxide emissions from ships calling EU ports must be reported from 2018. The MRV faces many challenges as it embraces a number of ship types. In addition it will include international shipping, which makes IMO, International Maritime Organization a crucial part of the development. When IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) met in April 18-22 april to discuss reductions on carbon dioxide from sea transport, different views if an international or an european approach was beneficial surfaced the debate.

At the meeting there was an agreement for mandatory system for ships to record and report their fuel consumption. The mandatory data collection system is will be developed in a three-step and includes ships of 5,000 gross tonnage and above. Ships will be required to collect consumption data for each type of fuel they use. The aggregated data will be reported to the flag State after the end of each calendar year.  Flag States will be required to transfer this data to the IMO Ship Fuel Consumption Database. IMO would be required to produce an annual report to the MEPC, summarizing the data collected. Data would be anonymized so individual ship data would not be recognized.

The draft mandatory data collection requirements will be put forward for adoption at the 70th MEPC session in October this year and could enter into force in 2018.

Through this development there was a discussion on the trade-off between the initiative from the EU and the international proposal.