Merchant fleet ownership and residence-based shipping emissions: implications for decarbonization policy
Ticaret filosu sahipliği ve ikamet esaslı denizcilik emisyonları: karbonsuzlaşma politikası için çıkarımlar
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Abstract
Shipping decarbonisation is regulated through ships, operators and ports, whereas national statistics allocate fleets and emissions by flag, ownership, residence or fuel sales. We combined UNCTAD fleet statistics, experimental OECD estimates of monthly maritime CO₂ allocated by the residence principle, and Climate Watch bunker-fuel emissions for Türkiye, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Norway and China, retrieved from the open GOMD platform with a notebook that refuses to substitute missing data. Türkiye's flag fleet in 2026 was 6.9 million deadweight tonnes (DWT), of which 26.5% tankers, 23.5% bulk carriers and 14.9% container ships, with an average age of 25.5 years; its nationally owned fleet (47.7 million DWT) was about seven times larger. Residence-based CO₂ attributed to Türkiye rose from 13.3 Mt in 2019 to 19.0 Mt in 2025. Dividing 2025 emissions by the owned fleet gives a crude intensity proxy that ranged from 220 t CO₂ per thousand DWT for Greece and 262 for China to 394 for Türkiye and more than 1,100 for Spain, France and Italy. In a country fixed-effects panel (N = 56), one additional million DWT of owned fleet was associated with 0.141 Mt more CO₂ per year (t = 11.2, within R² = 0.73). Türkiye's international bunker-fuel CO₂ rose by 0.395 Mt per year over 1990–2023, with a change point in 2003; the 2023 value (15.3 Mt) was 2.6 times the 2008 value. We discuss why these accounting bases differ, why the proxy is not the IMO Carbon Intensity Indicator, and what the figures imply for exposure to the EU Emissions Trading System and FuelEU Maritime.
Keywords
Merchant fleet; Shipping emissions; Residence principle; Bunker fuels; IMO GHG strategy; EU ETS; FuelEU Maritime; Türkiye
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