Why maritime decarbonisation now needs a governance architecture

Maritime decarbonisation is usually discussed in terms of fuels, engines, ship design, and infrastructure. These issues matter, but they are no longer the main constraint. The real bottleneck today is governance.

Shipping is not struggling because emissions cannot be reduced; it is struggling because the same emissions are now being measured, priced, certified, and enforced through multiple overlapping systems that were never designed to work together.

The question facing the industry is no longer whether carbon will be regulated; that is settled. The question is how many parallel interpretations of the same tonne-mile a single voyage must reconcile, contractually, operationally, and evidentially, before decarbonization becomes predictable rather than punitive.

Shipping remains one of the most globalised industries in the world. A vessel routinely crosses jurisdictions, regulatory cultures, and enforcement philosophies on a single voyage, yet emissions regulation is increasingly regional.

The European Union has introduced EU ETS and FuelEU Maritime with their own boundaries, pricing logic, and verification assumptions. The United Kingdom is now extending UK-ETS to shipping with different voyage segmentation rules, a separate registry, and a UK-only allowance universe. Other jurisdictions are developing parallel mechanisms.

Each of these frameworks is internally rational, and each reflects domestic policy priorities.
The problem is that ships do not operate within one system at a time.

A voyage that is partially priced under one regime may be treated entirely differently under another. Emissions that are counted once in one system may be excluded, discounted, or re-classified in another. The same data must be reported multiple times, in different formats, to different authorities.

A vessel can depart compliant and arrive partially non-compliant without changing fuel, speed, or behaviour. This is not a transitional inconvenience anymore; it is fragmentation by design.

Climate ambition has advanced faster than the mechanisms designed to coordinate it.

Lifecycle assessment methodologies differ across regions. Carbon pricing systems overlap geographically but not logically. Fuel certification schemes do not recognise each other. Emissions data is generated once but reported repeatedly, interpreted differently each time.

The result is not just administrative burden; it distorts markets.

Investment decisions become regulatory bets rather than engineering ones. Alternative fuels struggle to scale because their environmental value depends on where, and how, they are assessed. Price signals weaken when carbon costs cannot be compared meaningfully across regimes.

Fragmentation does not stop decarbonisation outright, it slows it, redirects it, and makes it riskier than it needs to be.

Digitalisation was meant to simplify compliance. In practice, it has exposed another fault line.

Shipping now depends on digital MRV systems, electronic certificates, automated reporting, and increasingly AI-assisted compliance tools. But the governance of data integrity, cybersecurity, digital identity, and verification remains uneven.

Some authorities require secure, traceable data flows, others still accept basic formats and manual submissions. AIS manipulation and GNSS interference remain realities in global trade, often driven by economic incentives to avoid scrutiny or reduce apparent emissions.

When digital systems exist without shared trust standards, transparency does not increase, vulnerability does.

Modern climate policy depends entirely on data, if that data cannot be trusted consistently, the credibility of the system itself erodes.

Fragmentation rarely produces a single dramatic failure, instead, it slowly degrades the system.

These are not isolated issues; they are connected failures of system design and incremental fixes can no longer absorb the strain.

This is not the first global industry to face this challenge. International finance encountered the same problem in the late twentieth century. Banks operated globally, while regulation remained national. Fragmentation produced arbitrage, instability, and systemic risk. The response was not a world regulator, but a coordination architecture: the Basel Accords.

Basel worked because it created:

It aligned systems without replacing them.

Maritime governance now faces a similar moment.

The next phase of maritime decarbonization will not be solved by adding more standalone regulations, it requires an interoperability architecture, a framework that allows different systems to recognize, translate, and reconcile each other’s outcomes.

Such an architecture does not remove sovereignty, it preserves it, while restoring coherence and at its core, rests on three principles:

Maritime decarbonisation will eventually happen, our real choice is how.

The industry can continue scaling complexity faster than it scales solutions, or it can deliberately design interoperability that preserves predictability while accelerating transition.

Global finance learned this lesson the hard way, maritime governance still has the opportunity to learn it by design.