New Opportunities For Financiers: Decarbonisation

If the shipping industry were a country on its own, it would be the sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter worldwide. Economic and regulatory pressures, including the much-discussed IMO 2020, have been building up and there is no question that it is time for all maritime stakeholders to start preparing for new decarbonisation challenges. In this blog we explore an internal pricing mechanism and an external collaboration, which each provide new opportunities for financiers to aid and profit from decarbornisation initiatives.

The main obstacle to industry-wide decarbonisation lies with the industry's composition; it is largely privately owned, and both shipowners and charterers are driven by short-term cyclical patterns. So far, public environmental concerns have not effectively been translated into any tangible pressure.

Incentivising shipowners is further complicated by the fact that they are responsible for investing in fuel-efficient technologies whereas it is the charterers who, in most cases, pay for fuel. As a result, only a small part of the fuel savings are...