Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has entered a five-year Impact Partnership agreement with the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD) to support decarbonisation in the shipping sector.
In the role of an Impact Partner, MSC will make cash contributions to pilots and trials under GCMD’s pooled resources.
The company will also be involved in projects, supplying access to vessels, operational equipment, vessel operating data and evaluation reports to support GCMD’s future trials.
Claimed to have the industry’s largest newbuilding order book of energy-efficient container ships, MSC currently has 730 vessels. The company is also said to be an early adopter of responsibly-sourced blended biofuels as a transitional fuel.
MSC Group Maritime Policy and Government Affairs executive vice-president Bud Darr said: “We are committed to helping to tackle climate change and in GCMD we believe we have found an excellent partner to help drive the green transition in our sector.”
Strategically located in Singapore, GCMD is focused on helping the maritime industry minimise greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by creating standards for future fuels and funding first-of-a-kind projects.
It also focuses on testing low-carbon solutions in an end-to-end manner under real-world operations conditions.
GCMD CEO professor Lynn Loo said: “Despite current economic uncertainties, decarbonising shipping will need liners – who are closest to customers willing to pay a green premium – to make hard commitments for the industry to progress towards IMO’s 2030 and 2050 goals.”
In January, MSC and Maersk decided to end their current 2M alliance in January 2025.
Launched in 2015, 2M is a container shipping line vessel-sharing agreement (VSA) focused on maintaining competitive and cost-efficient operations on Asia-Europe, Transatlantic and Transpacific trade routes.
