The University College London (UCL) Shipping and Oceans Research Group has launched a free online tool to assess the potential economic impacts of the IMO’s Net Zero Framework (NZF) on individual countries.
The NZF Economic Impacts Tracker covers 136 coastal countries, including 26 least developed countries and 36 small island developing states, allowing users to compare potential changes in shipping costs and traded goods prices under different policy options, UCL said in an emailed update on Tuesday.
The tool uses UN Comtrade data and the IMO's Fourth GHG Study to assess more than 10 million individual trade flows across hundreds of commodities.
It also examines eight essential food groups, highlighting how countries dependent on bulky, low-value cereal imports could face disproportionately higher increases in food import costs.
“Opaque methods for the evaluation of economic impacts from international maritime policy have hampered observers in their ability to effectively weigh up the costs and benefits of alternative proposed policy measures,” James Stewart, Research Fellow in Energy and Transport at the UCL Shipping and Oceans Research Group, said.
The IMO is set to hold technical negotiations on NZF from November 23-27, followed by a Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) meeting from November 30 to December 4.
The tracker is available here.
