As Arctic sea ice recedes due to global warming, ship traffic is increasing, posing global climate risks, particularly from black carbon emissions. Emitted by ships burning heavy fuel oil, black carbon accelerates ice melt and contributes to climate change. Despite this urgency regulatory progress on the topic has been slow. The International Maritime Organization has debated Arctic black carbon emissions for over a decade with little advancement. Notably, regulatory efforts on the topic so far have been driven mainly by non-state actors rather than states. However, their regulatory influence is hindered by a critical barrier: a lack of transparency. This article analyses the crucial role of transparency in international law-making, specifically for non-state actors, using Arctic black carbon regulation as a case study. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, the article identifies transparency challenges and suggests recommendations to overcome them, thereby strengthening the role of non-state actors within the regulation.
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At The Climate Show, we talk to leading experts on climate change law and politics. Through a series of conversations, we explore current developments in climate change research.
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Temperature data 1900–2010 from meteorological stations across the world have been analyzed and it has been found that all land areas generally have two different valid temperature trends. Coastal stations and hill stations facing ocean winds are normally more warm-trended than the valley stations that are sheltered from dominant oceans winds.
Thus, we found that in any area with variation in the topography, we can divide the stations into the more warm trended ocean air-affected stations, and the more cold-trended ocean air-sheltered stations. We find that the distinction between ocean air-affected and ocean air-sheltered stations can be used to identify the influence of the oceans on land surface. We can then use this knowledge as a tool to better study climate variability on the land surface without the moderating effects of the ocean.
We find a lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature data – with less impact of ocean temperature trends – after 1950. The lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature trends after 1950 should be considered when evaluating the climatic effects of changes in the Earth’s atmospheric trace amounts of greenhouse gasses as well as variations in solar conditions.
This paper aims to determine what the proper role of the judiciary should be in developing climate change policy. It does so in light of the sometimes contentious relationship between ‘activist’ or ‘progressive’ judges and the doctrine of separation of powers. This relationship has a long history by which much of human rights law has been shaped. The paper analyses the court judgments in the cases of Urgenda v Kingdom of the Netherlands, Juliana v United States, and Friends of the Irish Environment v Ireland in order to identify how different legal systems view this relationship. The paper also considers the upcoming climate case in the Supreme Court of Norway. In particular, the question is asked whether the separation of powers in Europe and the United States is a doctrine mandating systems of power balance rather than of strict separation.
Drawing on the argumentation from the Urgenda judgment, the paper concludes that the protection and development of human rights should be the main concern in climate change litigation. The judiciary should accordingly take an important role in climate change policy-making in order for the state to comply with its duty to instigate emission limits.
According to the narratives transmitted through media and political discourse, climate change reduces the ice coverage in the Arctic and enhances shipping and other forms of maritime activities. Especially, expectations of an increasing level of transit shipping between Asian, especially Chinese, ports and ports in Europe and North America is dominant. Evidence, however, tells that the numbers of transit shipping through the Arctic Ocean are very limited, and dominated by European shipping companies. For Greenland, political expectations have also been high, since Greenland has been seen as "strategically" situated in relation to new shipping routes in the Arctic, But, again, the actual development has been moderate and not related to international transits but conditions in Greenland itself.
The literature on climate change in the maritime transport industry has grown rapidly in the last few years. Yet as the research agenda has progressed, scientific debates have become more isolated and fragmented, making it difficult to translate new findings into broader policy debates. This article draws on problematization methodology to help organize the scientific debate on maritime emissions and to identify analytical gaps and challenges. We argue that scholars investigate shipping's emission problem from four distinct analytical perspectives— (1) international laws and regulations, (2) markets and economics, (3) engineering and technology, and (4) authority and legitimacy. Each of these perspectives problematizes maritime emissions in specific ways, leading to different policies and strategies to address the problem. We call for better integrating these four literatures and highlight three crosscutting areas and problems for future research. First, developing institutions that facilitate market and engineering solutions; second, integrating climate mitigation and adaptation research; and third, focusing on justice concerns to ensure an equitable green transition in the maritime industry.
The shipping sector's rising greenhouse gas emissions are often considered “hard-to-abate”. Some ship-owners have recently adopted or started to consider the adoption of alternative fuels, but systematic studies of this are still lacking. We address this gap by studying how ship-owners differ in both actual and intended adoption of alternative fuels. We analyze data from a unique survey with 281 ship-owners in Norway, a major ship-owning country and center for maritime technology development, with descriptive statistics and analysis of variance. We find early adopters among large and established ship-owners in offshore, international cargo and domestic passenger shipping segments, which are often subjected to specific contractual demands for alternative fuel adoption. Laggards were typically small and young ship-owners operating in shipping segments where demands for alternative fuel adoption are weak. Our findings also suggest that firms' business strategy and financial and knowledge resources may have relevance for ship-owner's adoption of alternative fuels. Our study has implications for national and international policymaking, highlighting for example how contracting mechanisms can be an effective tool in incentivizing the adoption of alternative fuels.
The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishermen, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their own fisheries. One of the key uncertainties in fisheries science and management can be linked to (our understanding of) fishermen's behaviour. In this report we describe the project efforts to better understand fisher behavior by assessing literature, interviews and data to advance towards a better representation of fisher behavior in our modelling. A better understanding of fisher behavior is especially needed in the context of change affecting Europe's marine ecosystems. Change is both related to the natural part of the ecosystem (ie climate change) as to the social side of the ecosystem (ie building of wind parks).
To that aim we present nine different case studies in Europe as examples of how fisher behavior has been studied and which factors are (or can be) relevant for a better understanding of fisher behaviour. Each case study ends with a table summarizing the factors influencing behaviour, the categories within that factor and the (potential) application in modeling as well as the implications for management. The table below summarizes the factors found / used in the case studies and the elements (social, cultural, ecological, economic and institutional) to which they relate. A variety of social factors were identified that are promising for use in modelling. A key conclusion is that social data are often context dependent and cannot be copy pasted from one situation to the other and in some cases, additional data needs to be collected. The cases also demonstrate that mixed methods approaches and interdisciplinary approaches are key to get in-depth understanding of fisher behavior in fisheries science.
To mitigate climate change due to international shipping, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires shipowners and ship technical managers to improve the energy efficiency of ships’ operations. This paper studies how voyage planning and execution decisions affect energy efficiency and distinguishes between the commercial and nautical components of energy efficiency. Commercial decisions for voyage planning depend on dynamic market conditions and matter more for energy efficiency than nautical decisions do for voyage execution. The paper identifies the people involved in decision-making processes and advances the energy-efficiency literature by revealing the highly networked nature of agency for energy efficiency. The IMO’s current energy efficiency regulations fail to distinguish between the commercial and nautical aspects of energy efficiency, which limits the ability to mitigate climate change through regulatory measures. Policymakers should expand their regulatory focus beyond shipowners and technical managers to cargo owners to improve energy efficiency and reduce maritime transport emissions.
This article reviews and examines the most significant climate-change-related impacts and adaptation from the perspective of stakeholders in Greenlandic fisheries. The study was constructed as a comprehensive, multi-site, bottom-up case study around Greenlandic fisheries (south-north/offshore-inshore), where interviews and workshops with Greenlandic fishermen and stakeholders have communicated their observations of fishery changes associated with changes in the marine environment within the last decade. Key observations include: changes in sea ice cover; increased abundance of known species in North Greenland; fish species relocation and periodic absences in coastal systems; a northward movement of the shrimp fishery; new and unprecedented bycatch issues; and new fisheries. Stakeholder knowledge acknowledges the capacity of both offshore and coastal fisheries to adapt to changing seasonality and distribution. Factory capacity and decision-making as well as bycatch legislation have been identified as the most critical bottlenecks for (re)diversifying fisheries and increasing the value of the locally available resources.