MSC CEO Soren Toft underscored the importance of working together to achieve net decarbonisation when he delivered the keynote address at DNV’s digital Fuel of the Future Conference last week.
The event is part of the annual Nor-Shipping convention.
“As shipping volumes have grown over the years, so have the environmental emissions produced as a by-product of delivering goods around the world.
"Nowadays, the rate at which emissions are rising has started to decline, but there is much still to do to make tackling climate change a global imperative.”
He said at MSC it was critical that the line’s priority was not only to respond to the huge demand in the very complex, congested markets that had emerged amid Covid, but also to ensure that they did not decouple this from their efforts to decarbonise.
And here, he says, collaboration is key to achieve the aspirational decarbonisation goals set out by the shipping industry.
“MSC itself already fosters industry-wide, as well as cross-sector collaboration in order to enable the massive investment needed to decarbonise shipping.
"While the company continues to invest in low-carbon technologies and explore different fuel options, carriers in general continue to struggle from a lack of solutions available at scale.
“With the total cost of decarbonising shipping estimated into the trillions of dollars, carriers must make expensive capital decisions that will live on for decades.
"Urgent investment and a better understanding of how business and society will share the cost burden are also required.”
He said the transition to a low-carbon economy required broad collective action and productive partnerships with stakeholders across and beyond shipping.
“By cooperating and collaborating with others, we will capitalise and build on the interdependencies between ocean-going and inland logistics as well as other sectors providing fuels, distribution systems and infrastructure,” he said.
He believes that in order to speed up the maritime industry’s energy transition it is now critical that policymakers catch up.
"Governments must play a vital role in catalysing the process and rapidly provide a more robust global framework to incentivise the transition.
“MSC continues to support the shipping industry’s proposal to create a global R&D fund for decarbonisation and would support some form of global market-based mechanism, potentially incorporating carbon pricing.”
