CREEL Seminar, with Dr Beatriz Romera

The Regulation of Emissions from International Maritime Transport: Ways Forward

May 1st 2018

Speaker: Dr Beatriz Martinez Romera

Convenor: Associate Professor Margaret Young

The regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from international maritime transport is a flagrant gap in climate change governance, where the sector has remained largely unregulated to date. In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change called for all sectors of the global economy, including maritime transport, to contribute to the stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions. However, international maritime transport was explicitly excluded from the Kyoto Protocol’s scope in 1997, and the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 without a reference to international maritime transport. The negotiations on the regulation of these sectors’ emissions under the International Maritime Organization have not faced a better fate. This seminar will address key issues in the regulation of international maritime transport emissions, giving an account of the current processes and potential regulatory pathways, in the era of the Paris Agreement.

Speaker: Dr Beatriz Martinez Romera (PhD, MSc, LLM), Assistant Professor of Environmental and Climate Change Law at the Center for International Law, Conflict and Crisis, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Dr Romera is the author of Regime Interaction and Climate Change: the Case of International Aviation and Maritime Transport (Routledge 2017). Her research focuses on the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation and maritime transport. She has a keen interest in the international law-making, climate negotiations, and the regulatory processes at the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization, as well as the developments at the EU level.

The Seminar was convened by Associate Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School).