on the agenda Passenger safety to dominate MSC 93


Looking beyond IMO’s recent Marine Environment Protection Committee meeting (MEPC 66) and the developments from it to be progressed further at the committee’s next session in October, the next big event on the IMO calendar will be te Maritime Safety Committee’s 93rd meeting, to be held on 14-23 May.


The agenda item almost guaranteed to generate most interest will be the subject of passenger ship safety where the continuing saga of recommendations from the Costa Concordia tragedy will continue to play out. On the subject of passenger ship safety, the insurance company Allianz Global Corporate and Speciality makes an ominous prediction in its Safety and Shipping Review 2014 publication.


In the opening executive summary, Allianz


says: “More than two years after the Costa Concordia disaster, improving passenger


ship safety continues to be a priority with a particular focus on services in Asia, where quality standards can be an issue. 2014 is likely to see the 100th loss of a passenger vessel since 2002. It is a sobering reminder that so many vessels and so many lives have been lost in such a short period and although many of the vessels were on domestic services and not subject to Solas rules and regulations, the attention of the marine industry certainly seems to have been focused in the wrong area for most of the 21st Century.


Other agenda items that are sure to generate interest are lifeboat servicing, maintenance and training requirements, matters relating to dangerous goods and the bulk code and the further developments in the drafting and making mandatory the IMO Polar Code. This last item in particular will conceivably have ramifications for propulsion


requirements and the already mandatory EEDI. One person taking a special interest in the discussions at MSC 93 will be IMO secretary- general Koji Sekimizu who said as much when addressing the new Sub-Committee on Ship Design and Construction on 20 January this year. That meeting marked the centenary of the adoption of the very first Solas, which came about as a reaction to the Titanic disaster.


Commenting on the Titanic and Costa


Koji Sekimizu (IMO): “Are we doing any better in our mission to enhance the safety of passenger ships?” (credit: IMO)


Is another ocean governing body needed?


“Governance is critical – our seas are in trouble for want of governance. But good governance is difficult to forge – not least in the high seas, where there is little formal jurisdiction. The sustainable use of our seas is equally essential – and intimately linked, of course, to better governance”. So reads the introduction to The Economist magazine’s World Ocean Summit held, in San Francisco in February. Provocative possibly but not apparently of great interest to ship operators and engineers except that Masamichi Morooka, chairman of the Internaional Chamber of Shipping (ICS) was among the panel for the opening debate and was compelled to remind delegates calling for a new governing body for the oceans to be established by the UN that, as far as shipping goes, one already exists in the shape of the IMO.


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Morooka said that IMO’s Marpol Convention on pollution prevention has contributed significantly to the dramatic


Concordia incidents, Mr Sekimizu asked: “We all know the discussions at the MSC and development over the last two years and still we have not finalised this very important issue. In comparison with our great great grandfathers’ generation, 100 years ago, are we doing any better in our mission to enhance the safety of passenger ships?” Referring to the debate at the coming Maritime Safety Committee on the issue of safety of large passenger ships, he said: “If we, at the MSC, cannot take action, I can tell you with confidence that nobody on this planet can take action and therefore the stakes are high for the discussion at the MSC in May.” After MSC 93, there will be a session of the IMO Council in June followed later in the summer by the initial meetings of three more of the new sub-committees established in last year’s restructuring of the IMO. At the end of June it will be the inaugural meeting of the new Sub-Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue (NCSR), followed in July by the Sub-Committee on Implementation of IMO Instruments (III) and in September the Sub-Committee on Carriage of Cargo and Containers (CCC) will meet for the first time.


reduction in oil pollution from ships despite massive growth in maritime trade. “Marpol also addresses sulphur emissions and the reduction


of CO2 from global shipping, the only global deal on CO2 emissions of its kind developed for a whole industrial sector. This will reduce


CO2 from ships by 20 per cent by 2020 with further reductions going forward,” he told


the conference.


The World Ocean Summit heard that “our seas are in trouble for want of governance” (credit: Blancpain)


The ICS chairman’s defence of the IMO was well considered but the organisation he leads was compelled to issue a statement saying, “If however – as has been suggested at the summit – a new body for ocean governance was eventually established, alongside the IMO, to deal with non- shipping issues, such as fishing and ocean acidification, ICS believes this would be best delivered without a radical overhaul ›››


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