By Mark Powell, 12 August 2020
I grew up with fishing and the ocean, and it’s been scary to see climate change making oceans
warmer, more acidic, and lower in oxygen. Our ocean future seems bleak, and we need strong, immediate action to head off disaster.
That’s why I’m happy to be part of OceanMind’s new project fighting climate change —Climate TRACE. Through this collaborative effort, we’re using our expertise to help fight the trend of climate change harming ocean ecosystems and the people who depend on them.
Climate TRACE aims to solve a monitoring problem that has limited progress on climate change. Right now, our inventory of carbon emissions is imprecise, out of date, and not transparent. Emissions monitoring is often months to years out of date and reported results may not allow investors or customers to identify and support leaders in emissions reductions. To reverse the harmful trends, we need better monitoring that allows us to support and reward the leaders in low carbon solutions and identify where more encouragement is needed to motivate progress.
OceanMind will track greenhouse gas emissions from shipping using our expertise in satellite tracking of vessels in combination with recent advances in AI, machine learning, and other technological tools. We will develop a near real time inventory of greenhouse gas emissions from shipping, attributable to responsible actors. This work will build on retrospective studies of shipping’s greenhouse gas emissions that have evaluated emissions from previous years, with results summarised by shipping sector, or travel routes.
We believe that tracking shipping’s greenhouse gas emissions will support efforts to reduce emissions by providing transparency and accountability. We will offer timely updates on industry progress and celebrate the successes of shipping industry leaders in reducing emissions. We invite engagement by shipping industry leaders and customers in this effort.
Reducing carbon emissions from shipping is important. International shipping produces over 2% of total human-caused emissions. If treated as a country, international shipping would have been the 6th largest emitter, just above Germany. But progress on shipping alone is insufficient. That’s why we’re especially pleased to be combining our efforts with experts on other sectors in the Climate TRACE collaboration.
The overall results of Climate TRACE will provide comprehensive and timely monitoring results across all emitting sectors. These results will provide the type of monitoring detail and breadth of coverage that are needed to manage efforts to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
We invite collaboration from organisations, companies, or individuals interested in helping to develop or use a shared global emissions monitoring tool.
For more information please contact comms@oceanmind.global