It is a well-known fact that global warming is one of the crucial problems in today’s world. Even though there are many important factors in the formation of global warming, I am going to mention only CO2 emission in this article as one of its significant factors. In the simplest terms, CO2 or carbon emission means the carbon release to the atmosphere. Because of the rapid population growth, over-industrialization, reduction of green areas and consumption of fossil fuels, the balance of carbon emission in nature has been changing inversely. Consequently, every sector should actually attach importance to its activities and take measures to decrease the rate of carbon emission. In that point, shipping industry has taken a step and created the world’s first collaborative research and development program to reduce CO2 emission.
The major aims of the program can be listed as follow:
- Decreasing the greenhouse gas emission by 50% until 2050,
- Using clean fuels or carbon-free fuels like hydrogen and fuel cells,
- Achieving the 2015 Paris Agreement’s climate change goals,
- Achieving rapid decarbonization,
- Decreasing the damage caused by the shipping industry to nature.
International Maritime Organization (IMO) has taken the lead and started this R&D program. As could be predicted, maritime or shipping sector is one of the largest industries in the world; therefore, it has also environmentally harmful activities. For instance, about 2% of man-made carbon emission is due to international maritime transports. In order to avoid such a damage to nature, some countries has broken new ground and they agreed to carbon reduction targets in 2018 under the roof of IMO.
About International Maritime Organization (IMO)
IMO is a specialized agency of United Nations and the aim of this agency is to provide safety of shipping and the prevention of atmospheric pollution. It is a non-governmental organization and at the present time, has 174 member states and three associate members. Beside this, IMO has many important duties like formation of regulations and standards for shipping industry. That is why, its sphere of activities is quite broad and every company in shipping industry has to pay attention of IMO’s decisions.
Turkey is also one of the IMO members but Council Member. In the year of 2019, it was selected one more time as Council Member of IMO’s 2020-2021 period. As known fact, Turkey has maintained its mission as Council Member since 1999.
As can be seen, almost the whole world is aware of its mission -protection of nature- because 174 of the 206 countries (there are 206 countries in the world together with non-UN members and unrecognized countries) took a step to reduce carbon emission. This is quite important improvement for the future of the world. I hope that every industrial sector takes such kind of step to save the world.
Do not forget: “We’re at war with nature. If we win, we’re lost” – Hubert Reeves
