Aronnax: Meet shipping’s high level climate champion

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Aronnax podcast the show that focuses on the transformation of the maritime and ocean space.

I’m Craig Eason, editorial director at Fathom.World where the stories we cover on the podcast will be found with additional detail.

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Now everyone around the world, whether involved in a maritime or ocean industry or not, will know that COP 26, the 26th meeting of the conference of parties to the UN framework Convention on Climate change will meet in Glasgow, and the expectations are high for nations to up their game and show more commitment to meet the temperature targets of the Paris Agreement.

This commitment will be in the form of nationally determined contributions. Shipping, so far at least, does not factor in them. The goal of decarbonising international shipping is still being left to the representatives of the member states who attend the International maritime organisations environmental meetings, the IMO of course being another UN agency like the UNFCCC

However, that does not mean there will be no place for shipping at COP 26. In fact shopping has been represented either by the IMO or industry players at earlier COP meetings and Glasgow is no different.

So now let me introduce my guest for this episode. Katharine Palmer. Katharine is our industry’s official climate champion. Her full time role is actually at the UK based classification society Lloyd’s Register, but they, or rather the Lloyd’s Register Foundation has lent her out on secondment to the UN high-level champions team to be their shipping lead.