As an addition to the ECSA position paper issued in October 2013 on the European Commission proposal for a CO2 MRV system on maritime transport, ECSA issued a position paper urging the EU legislators to refrain from extending the scope to ships above 400 GT and from including NOx/others GHG emissions which would respectively result in unnecessary administrative burden on small ships and in impractical monitoring issues in the proposed EU Regulation.
With incidents of maritime piracy declining and greater awareness of new maritime security threats, the shape and governance of various counter-piracy initiatives and institutions will come into question this year.
Not so long ago, explorers risked their lives and the lives of their crews in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Now the question is no longer if a route through the Arctic exists but how many ships will use the two routes now open each year along the northern coasts of Canada and Russia. Estimates for the possibility of making truly ice-free transits range from a few years to a few decades, but in the meantime, as evidenced by the hundreds of applications in 2012 and 2013 (495 successful applicants as of September 2013 to transit Russia’s Northern Sea Route, up from zero a mere five years ago), plenty of folks are willing to risk a little ice in pursuit of shorter shipping routes that were the goal of explorers since even before Lord Franklin’s famously lost expedition.
The North American Emission Control Area (ECA) proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require that all vessels travelling within 200 nautical miles of the North American coast run off an ultra-low sulphur content fuel.
Recently there is an increased threat of crew kidnap in the Gulf of Guinea with two new attacks on vessels taking place within a single week having also Nigerian-flagged vessels targeted by pirates and kidnapping six crew members.
Singapore-based ODFJELL and one of its senior crew members pleaded guilty a few days ago in federal court in Hartford, Conn., for violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS).
A few days ago USCG issued a Marine Safety Information Bulletin stating that U.S. Coast Guard Port State Control Officers will conduct unannounced examinations on a number of cruise ships for the remainder of 2014.
Built on the advent of modern electronics, ECDIS is bringing in a whole new level of performance by transferring all chart work elements onto an electronic display screen. This allows the seamless integration of Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC), GPS position fixing and other navigational tools, including radar, echo sounder, AIS and NAVTEX. Multiple functions are made available with just one click on the computer keyboard, a tap on an icon or the use of a mouse. Suddenly, the supporting tools needed to operate paper charts are history.
While piracy attacks seem to be on the decline off the coast of Somalia, pirates may be warming up in West Africa. As I and others have blogged about before, the Gulf of Guinea, as well the Nigerian Delta, have recently turned into hotbeds of piracy. The Nigerian Delta in particular, because of vast amounts of oil production which takes place there annually, has attracted potential pirates interested in seizing oil and selling it for profit on the black market.
During the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change summit, it is worth remembering that there is one huge industry that has so far managed to evade any formalised efforts at emissions reductions. Every industry and transport sector in the European Union has greenhouse-gas emissions reduction measures in place, except for the shipping sector. The EU has established goals on the emissions reductions it wants to achieve from the sector, but seems to have no intention of enacting anything that will bring it anywhere near those goals, anytime soon.
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Officer of the Watch 