Prof. Harilaos Psaraftis: The impact of COVID-19 on the decarbonization of shipping

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Prof. Harilaos N. Psaraftis, Technical University of Denmark

The impact of COVID-19 on the decarbonization of shipping: a blogger’s perspective

In his non-scientific blog, Prof. Psaraftis discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the decarbonization of shipping.

This topic is important because of the political debate within IMO and EU, respectively, on when, to what extent, at what cost and how worldwide shipping should be brought into some type of an emission offsetting and/or trading system – and what would e.g. the financial, technological, environmental consequences be.

“The so called ‘Initial IMO Strategy’ to reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions from ships was adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2018 and is currently the most important policy development as regards what the shipping community plans to do on climate change (IMO, 2018). The strategy classifies potential measures to reduce GHG emissions into three classes: short-term measures, medium-term measures, and long-term measures. […]

As expected, much of the discussion after the adoption of the strategy in 2018 has focused on short-term measures, and specifically on how such measures can help achieve the 2030 target, reduce CO2 emissions per transport work, also known as ‘carbon intensity’, as an average across international shipping, by at least 40% by 2030, compared to 2008.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a blow to the Initial IMO Strategy at several levels […]”

Continue reading here.

Prof. Harilaos N. Psaraftis

Since 2013 Harilaos N. Psaraftis is a Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Management Science Division. He has a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) (1974), and two M.Sc. degrees (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) from MIT, USA. He has been Assistant and Associate Professor at MIT from 1979 to 1989 and Professor at NTUA from 1989 to 2013.  He has participated in some 55 research projects, including 25 from the EU.

Psaraftis has coordinated 3 EU projects including project SuperGreen on green corridors. He has been a member and chairman of various groups at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and has also served as CEO of the Piraeus Port Authority (1996 -2002). He has published extensively and has received several academic and industry awards. His latest book is  Sustainable Shipping: A Cross-Disciplinary View, Springer (2019).

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