THE recent One Planet Summit in Paris, convened by French president Emmanuel Macron, gave a much-needed political push to the International Maritime Organisation's (IMO) climate talks which will resume in April. At least that is the view of the environmental lobbyists who think that IMO is more or less a hopeless case and that next spring's meeting is the last chance for the UN agency to at last start to do something "meaningful" to cut the sector's greenhouse gas emissions and play its part in tackling global warming.

Another view would be that the Paris summit was an exercise in grandstanding which failed to recognise the political realities and unfairly denigrated the progress that has already been made at IMO.

European states were joined by the Marshall Islands, Chile, Mexico and other countries in a call for urgent action to tackle shipping's contribution to the climate crisis. Signatories to the Tony De Brum Declaration restated their support for the objectives of the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement and called for action on shipping consistent with those objectives.