Abstract
Shipping is the indispensable means of distributing goods between places of production and areas of consumption on our globe and is often claimed to be the most environmentally friendly mode of transport. However, there is a distinguished backwardness of shipping technology in environmental terms due to the hard competition within the globalised shipping business.
This article categorises impacts from ships on the environment from operational sources, by ship accidents and by the use of limited resources. It recognises the effort made by the IMO and other organisations in regulating ship operations and preventing accidents. However, there is widespread local or regional discontent in communities ashore concerning these mandatory regulations or the circumstances of their implementation.
This discontent has initiated various regional incentive systems, which are intended to cause ship operators to meet safety or environmental requirements that exceed mandatory regulations and grant a commercial benefit to those operators who comply. The article presumes that all of these incentive systems for “quality shipping” suffer from the unsolved question of how to finance the commercial rewards in a manner that fits into a competitive economy.
It appears that incentive systems will never become stable and long term establishments that can exist parallel to statutory regulations. The conclusion is, however, that we need these incentive systems as tools for testing new developments in the never-ending process of adapting our civilisation to the limited resources of our planet earth.
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Kaps, H. Quality shipping — incentives, disincentives. WMU J Marit Affairs 3, 85–97 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03195051
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03195051