EU regulatory action on maritime emissions: Unilaterally protecting the environment beyond IMO’s global strategy

Abstract

In 2015, the Paris Agreement (Paris Agreement 2015) was adopted to strengthen the global response to climate change by limiting the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. Addressing the problem of maritime emissions from ships is essential to achieve the above objective, but the Paris Agreement, like the Kyoto Protocol (Kyoto Protocol 1997), remains silent on this.