So when the nation’s foreign minister showed up at a recent meeting of the International Maritime Organization and proposed limiting the amount of climate-warming gases that the shipping industry could emit, he caused a stir.
“It’s a matter of survival for us,” Tony de Brum, the minister of foreign affairs, said by telephone. The Marshall Islands consist of low-lying coral atolls that could be swamped by rising sea levels associated with climate change. “We cannot address climate change without looking at all the components that are contributing to the problem of emissions,” Mr. de Brum said.
The Marshall Islands’ call for greenhouse gas reduction targets for shipping failed to win approval at the I.M.O., which is a United Nations agency that establishes rules for international shipping. But it has reinvigorated the debate about how to control carbon pollution from shipping, which accounted for about 2.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions between 2007 and 2012, according to a report last year by the I.M.O. Emissions from the sector are projected to rise anywhere from 50 percent to 250 percent by 2050 under “business as usual” scenarios, the report found.
Scrutiny of shipping is growing. In April, the European Union approved a regulation, scheduled to take effect in 2018, that will allow it to collect information on the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from large ships docking in its ports.
“What’s been agreed at E.U. level is enormously important,” partly because it has been difficult to enact regulations on the shipping industry, said John Maggs, a senior policy adviser with Seas at Risk, an environmental group based in Brussels.
Read more at Marshall Islands, the Flag for Many Ships, Seeks to Rein In Emissions
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