Our focus at WISTA UK is on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and in particular SDG 5 — achieve gender equality. We would like to see all women and girls feeling empowered and becoming active participants in our industry.
This article is part of a series written by people across shipping in response to this question about how to deploy a hypothetical TradeWinds Sustainable Shipping Fund:
How, where and why would you invest $1bn for the best return in sustainable shipping, as the industry grapples with the need to cut carbon emissions, improve efficiency and keep cargoes moving in a world facing multiple economic and political challenges? The investment will be made now and ideally held for the next seven years to the end of the decade. As an added bonus, give one policy or regulation you would like to implement from 1 January 2023 to benefit shipping?
Research shows female participation and leadership drive better environmental outcomes. In fact, countries with a higher percentage of women in parliament appear to implement stricter climate change policies, which of course lead to lower emissions.
Women work to produce holistic solutions that make for effective climate action. Wista UK promotes this diversity in the maritime, trading and logistics sectors as we believe that gender diversity is key to providing a sustainable future for the shipping industry internationally.
Therefore, I would invest half the money in projects that shape a more diverse world and work to achieve gender quality and which empower all women and girls in shipping, including, seafaring, onshore, offshore and in maritime technologies.
I would invest the other half in innovative technological inventions.
Current zero-carbon fuels and technologies do not appear to be available at the scale or price needed for greater adoption by the industry so I feel we need to widen our focus, where there is a possibility of potential sources of near limitless clean energy. We are looking far into the future.
Recent news has focused on breakthroughs in recreating nuclear fusion by scientists after decades of research. For the first time, scientists have managed to produce more energy from a fusion experiment than was put into it.
The energy was just enough to boil a few kettles this time but it is the future potential that we are looking at, not what it does now.
Having fusion energy as a source of power could be life-changing for shipping. Fusion is safer than fission, and produces more energy and no greenhouse gas emissions — so it is not contributing to climate change.
I know we are not currently anywhere near a reliable, scalable or stable power source, but scientists seem to suggest we are only a couple of decades of research away from technologies that could enable them to build a power plant on fusion technology.
I would be very interested in seeing this technology at the forefront, to see its uses, safety mechanism, application — at least from the climate-change perspective.
I would focus the balance of the funding on research towards fusion technologies and its application to the shipping sector and any safety concerns of using the technology.
