CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS
Low Carbon Shipping – A Systems Approach was
deliberately ambitious in its scope and breadth. The
need to bring consistency, objectivity and numeracy to
the assessment and optimisation of the various options
necessitated a system-wide approach to understand
shipping’s potential to decarbonise. GloTraM is the
model developed in this project that links all the issues
together, providing transparency of data and overall
costs. In addition to modelling, the project undertook
a broad range of fundamental and multidisciplinary
analyses in order to address many of the key drivers
and the complex interactions that characterise the
shipping industry, including:
Capturing the logistic supply chain/ship design
interactions
Joining up the technical and operational
parameters to properly understand and evaluate
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Assessing the economic implications of radical
departures from current technologies and operating
practices
Closing of the loop between the operational
measurements of performance and the tools used
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Taking the wider system view of carbon emissions
(rather than just the emissions from the ship itself),
e.g. the work on alternative fuels
Capturing the interaction between mitigation policy
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Understanding the reasons for the gap between
perception and reality, e.g. analysis of market
barriers
Making visible the importance of life cycle
assessments
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growing climate change challenge. There is a wide
range of evolutionary improvements in ship design
that could be applied over the next few decades
(enabled both through existing regulation - EEDI
and SEEMP, expectations of sustained high energy
prices, and technological advancements) that offer
modest improvements but will not deliver the levels of
decarbonisation required to avoid dangerous climate
change. Therefore more radical change is required and
the sooner fair frameworks and mechanisms to enable
this change are established, the less damaging this will
be for the industry.