European shipping companies, including the German giant Hapag-Lloyd, and NGOs wrote to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on Monday 17 February asking it to exclude unsustainable biofuels from its list of green alternatives to traditional fossil fuels.
While the IMO has set itself ambitious targets for reducing maritime traffic to zero by 2050, it has not yet specified the means for achieving them. According to the letter’s signatories, “without key safeguards, the new measures could lead to palm and soy oil to skyrocket as they will become the cheapest fuel to comply with lower emission standards, while waste biofuels such as used cooking oil are limited in availability”.
In line with the recommendations of the United Nations Environment Programme, they are calling on the IMO and EU Member States to discourage the use of crop-based biofuels by ships.
According to a study by one of the signatories, the NGO network Transport & Environment (T&E), the IMO’s green strategy could generate 270 million tonnes more greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 than today, because 60% of biofuels will come from palm and soya, which are strongly linked to deforestation. What’s more, only 2.5% and 3% of international shipping could be fuelled by animal fats and vegetable oils in 2030, as reserves of waste biofuels are limited.
Read the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/fam
Read the study: https://aeur.eu/f/fjj (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)