IMO Net-Zero Framework: Shipping's First Global Carbon Price Faces Its December Vote

In less than a month, delegates at the International Maritime Organization in London will decide whether international shipping becomes the first industry in the world to carry a global carbon price. The framework on the table, the IMO Net-Zero Framework, was approved in draft in April 2025, adjourned at the moment of adoption that October, and argued over ever since. Its next test comes at the Marine Environment Protection Committee's 85th session, MEPC 85, from 30 November to 3 December, with a resumed extraordinary session scheduled for 4 December that could formally adopt it.

The stakes are easy to state and hard to overstate. International shipping produces roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, about as much as a large national economy, yet it has remained largely exempt from the climate rules that govern power plants, cars and factories. The framework would change that in one move: a mandatory global fuel standard for ocean-going ships above 5,000 gross tonnage, which account for around 85% of shipping's carbon dioxide, combined with a pricing mechanism for emissions above agreed limits. Ships that beat the stricter direct compliance target would earn surplus units they could sell; ships that fall short would buy remedial units, at $100 per tonne of CO2 equivalent for shortfalls between the two targets and $380 per tonne for missing the base target altogether. The revenues, estimated at $10–15 billion a year, would flow into a Net-Zero Fund for clean fuels, seafarer training and support for developing countries.

That this is still a draft, nineteen months after it was agreed, is the story. Adoption was adjourned in October 2025 after opposition led by the United States and Saudi Arabia, whose central objection was that regional carbon pricing already exists — above all the European Union's Emissions Trading System, which covers shipping emissions on EU routes — and that a global price on top would charge the industry twice for the same tonne. MEPC 84, in April and May of this year, kept the draft alive as the basis for talks but resolved nothing. The intersessional working group that met in London from 1 to 4 September then ended without agreement, the third consecutive meeting to fail to close the framework's pending issues. One more working-group round is scheduled for 23 to 27 November, immediately before MEPC 85.

What has changed since the adjournment is the European side of the argument. The EU has proposed changes to its shipping ETS designed to remove the double-pricing objection: if the IMO sets a global price, ships would not pay twice for the same emissions under the EU system, and analysis by Transport & Environment puts the actual overlap at only around 15% of relevant emissions. The EU has also proposed setting aside around €100 million a year for shipping decarbonisation in small island states and least-developed countries, and an "ETS as a service" arrangement that would let trading partners raise revenue on their share of emissions through the EU's existing system. The point of these moves is to leave the framework's opponents with no procedural excuse. Whether they will accept that framing is a different question: as of late October, the blocking states had still not offered a meaningful compromise of their own.

Meanwhile the proposals on the table have spread further apart rather than converging. Tuvalu has proposed tripling the initial Tier 1 remedial unit price from $100 to $300 per tonne and abolishing surplus units, which would maximise revenue for zero-emission fuels and a fair transition at the cost of the steepest freight increases. A Liberian-backed proposal, supported by several Gulf and Arab states, would strip out greenhouse gas pricing altogether. Japan has offered a middle path that preserves the fuel-intensity targets while softening their trajectory. MEPC 85 must somehow turn that spread into a single text that can be adopted on 4 December, or the process slips again — and with it, the investment certainty that shipowners, fuel producers and ports say they need to build the alternative-fuel infrastructure.

My own read is that adoption in December is possible but not the likelier outcome. The EU's concessions genuinely answer the stated objection, and the framework survived MEPC 84 when it could have been killed outright, which suggests a majority still wants a deal. But three straight meetings have failed to produce one, the opposition has not moved, and the remaining disagreements are about the price itself, not the plumbing around it. A framework adopted in a weakened form is also possible, which is why the prediction attached to this article is deliberately narrow: formal adoption of the framework as a whole, not merely further negotiation. If December ends without adoption, shipping keeps its exemption, the EU's regional rules carry the weight alone, and the first global carbon price waits for another year — a delay the industry's own transition planning can ill afford, and the climate's least of all.