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UCL Energy Institute present with WWF on Market Based Measures for International Transport

26 June 2013

Nagore Sabio at UNFCCC

The UCL Energy Institute Transport group was delighted to present in UNFCCC climate change negotiations side event last week (Tuesday 11 June) their ongoing collaborative research with WWF Norway on the potential impacts of imposing a cap on international shipping emissions in line with international GHG stabilisation.

The side event goal was to activate the negotiations towards an agreement on emissions pricing for international shipping and aviation. The main target was to propose potential solutions to tackle the undesirable impacts of market based measures (MBM)  for these sectors and to bring up new discussion points for the IMO, ICAO and UNFCCC to come closer to an agreement.

In the event, Tim Johnson, from the Aviation Environment Federation presented on the MBM potential on aviation and the state of the play of ICAO in the discussions. After explaining that the 2% efficiency imporvement target for 2020 is never rreached in the scenarios presented, he pointed that the impact of MBM in the aviation costs would increase the ticket prices only about 2-4 dollars. Revenue numbers are around 12 billion per annum with modest carbon trading scheme and up to 26 billion per annum with levy. Jasper Faber, managing director of aviation and shipping transport in CE Delft presented on carbon pricing for shipping. His presentation focused on solutions to address undesirable impacts, raising revenues, ETS offset credits and fuel levy.  Also Mark Lutes, present policy coordinator in WWF, represented the state of the play in IMO and the potential impacts of an international MBM in the Brazilian shipping sector. He stated that the impacts of MBM in shipping appear to be small in terms of job creation, and pointed that recycling part of the revenues from carbon pricing into the sector for increasing efficiency measures could avoid losses within the sector and in job creation.

In this sense, our presentation given by Lars Erik Mangset, WWF-Norway advisor, focused on the potential impacts that bridging the emissions gap presented by UNEP  would have on international shipping. The sensitivy of carbon prices to the year of implementation of a market based measure accounting for a 35% total share for rebate mechanisms, 35% for internal recycling within the sector and 30% for Climate fund were analysed and presented using UCL EI GloTraM model. The results include different scenarios, including UNEP BAU, conventional fuels and alternative fuels technologies uptake in the international fleet.

Report by Nagore Sabio (second from right in image)