Ships can be used as platforms to gather climate-related data from oceans with that knowledge being used to offset against carbon emissions, maritime futurist KD Adamson suggested at a London International Shipping Week (LISW) event.

The idea of “ships as platforms of opportunity” has been raised at the World Ocean Council, Adamson said at the OneWeb LISW Talk Show event ‘Shaping a new vision for accelerating ESG strategies in shipping’.

“We tend to think about data on ships being operational data, but what the World Ocean Council is talking about is ships as platforms of opportunity,” she said.

“The idea being that you could use ships to be collecting all sorts of other data — about climate, water columns, all sorts of different things.”

Adamson, who is described as futurist-in-residence at maritime foresight agency Futurenautics and is author of the book Shipping and the 800-lb Gorilla, added that she feels the approach “could be an interesting opportunity to use data to offset if we are going to have vessels that are going to be more carbon intensive than we want for the next 10 years”.

Roberto Coustas, chief executive of shipping AI company Deepsea Technologies, said data gathered by ships could have a social as well as commercial value within shipping.

“We don’t know the wave amplitude in different parts of the ocean. That’s a major factor that affects fuel consumption.

“If we had an accelerometer on a vessel and we knew how it was influenced by waves we could use the data to enrich our knowledge about the ocean and the climate: that could have a lot of value in itself.”

Accelerometers measure proper acceleration, which is the rate of change of velocity from a state of rest.

Ardmore Shipping chief executive Anthony Gurnee agreed, but he said the question is how to incentivise shipping companies to do that.

“If they philosophically feel more strongly about contributing that would make a difference,” Gurnee added.

“We do have accelerometers but nobody has asked us for the data.”