The maritime energy transition will require support for human capacity development across developing States, including SIDS and LDCS, as well as investment in scalable and bankable projects that will support the move to zero emission shipping by or around 20250, in line with IMO's GHG Strategy.
During an IMO Future Fuels and Technology Project session on "Maritime Infrastructure and the Global Energy Transition: From Supply to Deployment" in Busan, Republic of Korea (29 October), IMO's Sonakshi Mishra highlighted IMO's holistic approach to technical cooperation to help bridge financing gaps and achieve sustainable, long-term impacts, through the FINSMART+ and GHG-SMART projects.
FINSMART+ is a recently launched GEF project which IMO is executing in collaboration with EBRD and The World Bank Group. It aims to advance maritime decarbonization projects, including existing IMO technical cooperation projects related to national action plans, pilots and feasibility studies – supporting them towards investment readiness by facilitating partnerships and matchmaking with potential financiers.
GHG-SMART is supporting capacity development in climate finance and project development, while generating knowledge base on climate finance in the maritime sector. A new study, currently being finalized under the GHG-SMART programme, will assess for the first time, climate finance flows across the maritime sector and identify financing gaps and opportunities. The findings aim to inform efforts to improve access to finance for the maritime energy transition, particularly in developing countries, including small island developing States (SIDS) and least developed countries (LDCs).
Closing the financing gap requires strengthening maritime administrations' capacity to prepare bankable proposals, integrating maritime priorities into national climate, energy and investment plans, and aggregating demand across sectors and, particularly for SIDS, regionally to achieve economies of scale.
The IMO Future Fuels and Technology Project session was delivered in collaboration with Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries (MOF) of the Republic of Korea as part of the Decarbonization Forum, in Busan (29 October) during Korean Maritime Week.
IMO's Seungjun Seo presented the expansive data available on the IMO Future Fuels and Technology website.
The event was attended by more than 400 people, including representatives from governments, international organisations, financial institutions, industry, academia, research institutions and port authorities.
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