INSIGHT: Delay on IMO Net Zero Framework Risks Greater Industry Fragmentation

Philippos Ioulianou is managing director of Emissionlink. Image Credit: Emissionlink

As everyone either sighed with relief or rolled their eyes at the IMO's decision to delay its Net Zero Framework, few seem to grasp what could be coming while we wait for a resolution.

What looks like a pause is, in reality, a power vacuum and national regulators are already rushing to fill it.

Many countries stand to benefit, using the delay to launch their own systems. The UK's Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS) comes into force in June 2026.

Turkey is lining up its own version, while Gabon on Africa's west coast is openly discussing a local carbon levy. Where they lead, others will surely follow.

For governments under budget pressure, carbon pricing has less to do with environmental policy and more to do with revenue.

Countries face widening fiscal gaps and this is an easy way to plug them.

By stalling on a global standard, the industry is accelerating the creation of fragmented regional systems.

Shipping was meant to embrace decarbonisation under one flag with global rules for a global ocean. Instead, we're drifting towards a patchwork quilt of carbon schemes, stitched together by short-term politics.

Each will bring its own reporting formats, verification rules, and traps for the unwary.

Good luck to the shipowner who gets it wrong.

Picture a vessel calling at a West African port, unaware of a newly introduced local regulation. The port authority could detain it for non-compliance and the owner is left footing the bill.

The irony is hard to miss.

Charterers demand reliability, while shipowners could face fines and detentions for rules in a country they didn't even know existed. Smaller and mid-sized owners, without the luxury of in-house compliance teams, would be the first to feel the pain.

Worse still, there's no guarantee the revenues raised will fund genuine decarbonisation.

Some governments won't even know how much they'll collect from ETS schemes until year-end and when the numbers arrive, the temptation surely will be to divert them to other, more immediate causes?

Carbon markets were meant to drive cleaner ships, not fund pension deficits. Instead of aligning the industry, we may see governments chase easy cash whilst claiming its for the benefit of the planet.

Turkey's next move could trigger a domino effect.

Each new national system that gets implemented will make it harder for the IMO to rebuild a globally agreed approach later. Like a maritime Humpty Dumpty, once the rules shatter into regional fragments, they'll be impossible to piece back together.

The cost of this fragmentation is already showing.

Asian owners are quietly steering clear of European routes, wary of overlapping compliance traps. If the IMO waits much longer, trade patterns could start redrawing themselves along regulatory fault lines.

The delay is meant to give the industry time to adapt.

Instead, it risks breeding confusion, competition, and complacency. The world isn't waiting for London to decide, it's moving ahead, one emissions scheme at a time.

For shipowners, the message is clear.

Compliance can't be managed port by port or spreadsheet by spreadsheet. While the industry waits for clarity, owners need a real-time approach to tracking changing rules with reliable data and strategies that anticipate rather than react.

That's where companies like EmissionLink can help. We monitor global emissions schemes continuously, translating fast-moving regulation into practical guidance so owners can stay compliant, and stay trading without being caught by local tariff schemes.

The choice is simple. You either build the capability to track and manage compliance globally, or risk being caught out at the next port of call.

The industry needs clarity and consistency.

Either we move together or we'll end up with a hundred different systems no one can reconcile. In the end, delay doesn't buy us much time to avoid more chaos.