Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport (MCST) Blog

The EU announcement that it will now move to include international shipping in its regional ETS raises critical issues for both European States and NGOs. The question before both is the impact of this on the IMO debate on market based measures, now that it has finally agreed to debate the Marshall/Solomon Islands proposal for a universal GHG levy. Unlike the EU ETS, the levy can claim credibility as being ambitious and equitable.   EDF's recent blog on this caught my eye this week ( @  Panos Spiliotis   http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2021/07/20/the-eu-has-the-power-to-bring-transformational-change-to-global-shipping/ ) and prompted this comment: Hi EDF Thanks for an interesting article. Can I ask you to publicly clarify EDF’s position on MBM’s for shipping and your comment that EU is being ambitious. In our opinion, the EU ETS will have some limited impact on moving shipping toward decarbonisation, but is clearly inadequate for a 1.5 agenda and therefore fails the P...

  Can Fiji turn Attention to Retention? Andrew Irvin, Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport, andrew.irvin@usp.ac.fj As Fiji focuses on the future of its shipping sector, reflection on its past is a crucial undertaking. While in recent years, Fiji has revived its sailing heritage and enjoys an active sailing and paddling community alongside the continued presence of small-scale shipbuilding and larger dry-docking/repair operations, the capacity to independently meet the needs of domestic shipping operations has fallen by the wayside. Understanding what is required to accommodate the existing needs across the industry reveals that the public enterprise reform [1] undertaken thirty years ago offers only a partial blueprint for restoration of this capacity. It was not only a stripping of material assets that took place. Fiji has now endured three decades of human resource capacity loss as citizens seek education and employment opportunities abroad. In 1994, a few years aft...

by Alison Newell, Technical Advisor to MCST and Director Sustainable Sea Transport  This article was written a year ago before appearing in this blog. Turning the tide: what do we do about small boats and the crucial role they play in Fiji’s domestic maritime fleet?   There has been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about the allocation of R&D funding to support the decarbonisation of large ships as part of the covid-19 economic stimulus responses around the world. Countries such as Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Germany and others have announced multi-million dollar financing packages for zero-emissions or low-carbon vessel design and trials (see for example the UK Government’s recent announcement of £400m for a Belfast-based project to develop zero emission, high-speed ferries https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4017015/belfast-zero-emission-ferry-project-gbp400m-uk-government-funding-winners ).   There has also been discussion on how Fiji could position itself as...

  "....During the crisis, lack of truckers, time-consuming inspections, and quarantine in port customs hampered fresh food delivery globally. For example, India, the world's biggest rice exporter, suspended its exports due to labor shortages and logistics disruptions. As a result,  the number of food-insecure people rose significantly during the pandemic . Changing trade patterns and imbalances have left many containers in places where they are not needed, and others are held up in ports or on ships for weeks due to congestion. The resulting unprecedented shortage of available containers has led to historically high container freight rates..." UNCTAD brings home reality for countries struggling to understand issues in the maritime sector in the midst of COVID 19. Pooling together knowledge and data for more sustainable maritime transport | UNCTAD.