• Decarbonisation

IWG on Decarbonisation

Decarbonisation is one of the most significant challenges of our era. The maritime industry has increasingly become aware of the role it is called upon to play, largely as a result of regulatory initiatives by the International Maritime Organisation and the European Union. However, the legal and contractual issues that arise, private law aspects, as opposed to regulatory aspects, have not yet attracted sufficient attention. The international community of maritime lawyers clearly has an important role to play in decarbonisation.

In these circumstances, the Comité Maritime International established an International Working Group (IWG) on Maritime Decarbonisation in July 2023. The IWG’s work addresses areas such as a liability regime for new fuels, contractual guidelines on the description of new-fuel readiness, and issues relating to the contractual architecture of maritime trade in a decarbonisation context.

The work of the IWG was presented at the CMI Colloquium in Gothenburg in May 2024 and is summarised in three Discussion Papers  (“The Gothenburg Decarbonisation Discussion Papers”), in each of the workstreams, which can be found below.

The Gothenburg Decarbonisation Discussion Papers represent the first phase of the IWG’s work. The second phase includes more detailed analysis, involving – as and where appropriate – associations and organisations that can work with the CMI to address the issues identified. Updated versions of the Gothenburg paper, the Tokyo papers, were published and discussed at the CMI Colloquium in Tokyo in May 2025. Most recently, at the CMI Colloquium in Rio de Janeiro in May 2026, the IWG presented its work again, this time restructured into separate papers per workstream, each downloadable from its own workstream subpage.

The steering committee consists of Haris Zografakis (chair), Prof. Dr. Jolien Kruit, Neil Henderson , and Prof. Charles Debattista.