A recent US court ruling restricting President Trump’s ability to impose sweeping tariffs has improved the chances of an international deal to cut emissions from shipping, observers of UN maritime talks have said.

Government officials meeting at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London this week and next are resuming negotiations on a proposed set of measures known as the Net-Zero Framework (NZF), aimed at tackling the sector’s roughly 3% share of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Last October, Trump and his officials threatened any government voting to adopt provisionally agreed green shipping measures, known as the Net-Zero Framework (NZF), with tariffs that would make it harder for their businesses to export to the USA.

The intervention helped derail talks, with governments narrowly voting to postpone for a year the adoption of the NZF.

The framework, provisionally agreed in April 2025 after years of negotiations, would penalise the owners of particularly polluting ships and use the revenues to fund cleaner fuels, support affected workers and help developing countries manage the transition.

The delay plunged the future of the NZF into doubt. Vanuatu’s climate minister said the delay was “unacceptable” given the urgency of tackling climate change. A final decision on the NZF is not expected until November.

Tariff threat neutered

Since the last round of negotiations, the political landscape has shifted. In February 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump had no legal authority to impose sweeping tariffs without approval from Congress.

Rockford Weitz, professor of maritime studies at Tufts University, said that his officials would have “a more challenging time” using tariffs as threats at this month’s shipping talks than they did in October.

University College London professor Tristan Smith, a close observer of IMO talks, agreed that the tariff threat is “not quite as potent as it was last year”. He noted that the US also no longer benefits from the element of surprise. In October, Washington began lobbying governments only shortly before the talks, leaving little time for countries supporting the NZF to coordinate a response.

This time, Smith said supporters of the framework – which include most European countries, Pacific Islands and some African and Latin American states – are “working very closely together” to resist the US’s pressure.

He added that the US’s attempt to promote liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a transition shipping fuel, rather than renewable-electricity-based solutions like ammonia or methanol, by weakening the NZF has been undermined by the spike in the cost of gas triggered by the Iran war.

Attempts to re-negotiate

But divisions remain in the talks scheduled to run until Friday next week. Ahead of this round of negotiations, some governments have proposed re-negotiating the core tenets of the NZF, while others insist it should be adopted in November largely as provisionally agreed in April 2025.

This debate played out last week on a webinar hosted by the African Futures Policies Hub. Liberian diplomat Grace Nuhn said the emissions-reduction requirements included in the NZF are “over-zealous” and “over-ambitious” and do not reflect the limited availability of clean fuels, while penalising “transitional fuels” such as LNG and biofuels.

In a formal submission, Liberia – alongside US ally Argentina and Panama – has proposed weakening emission targets and ditching any funding mechanism for the framework involving “direct revenue collection and disbursement”.

Liberia and Panama host the world’s two biggest ship registries, meaning their governments earn revenue from allowing shipowners from around the world to register vessels in their countries.

The NZF would penalise owners of ships that emit more than certain agreed amounts and use that revenue to clean up the maritime sector, help workers through the green transition and compensate for any negative impacts of the transition on developing economies.

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Japan has also proposed that, in order to reach a compromise with the NZF’s opponents, emissions reduction targets and requirements to pay into the IMO’s Net-Zero Fund are weakened.

Yuki Inoue, a diplomat from Japan’s transport ministry, told the webinar that this would reduce the perception that the NZF is a “carbon tax”. Japan wants to get all governments “back to the discussion table”, he said.

NZF a “fragile compromise”

But Tuvalu’s IMO negotiator Pierre-Jean Bordahandy said that the NZF itself is a “fragile compromise” reached after lengthy discussions and is the “only viable path forward” to meet the sector’s climate targets agreed in 2023.

Tuvalu and six other Pacific nations have vowed to try to make the NZF more ambitious if it is reopened for negotiation. With rising sea levels threatening their survival, “time is not on our side”, Bordahandy told the webinar.

Brazil has also pushed back against attempts to renegotiate. Diplomat Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned that it would be unrealistic to expect countries to rewrite a deal in a matter of months after more than two years of negotiations involving over 100 nations culminated in the April 2025 vote in favour of the NZF.

She added that proposed changes to the NZF would not address climate change and food insecurity and “seem aimed at addressing diplomatic pressure imposed by a small group of countries rather than the issue itself”.

Mexico has defended the framework’s funding mechanism. Raul Zepeda Gil, an advisor to the country’s IMO mission, said the net-zero fund is essential to ensure developing countries can access financing for cleaner ships and infrastructure. Without the fund, “then just a few countries will be available to participate in the transition”, he warned

Some countries that previously supported delaying the NZF now appear more aligned with its backers. Kenya was among 16 African nations that voted for postponement last October.

But this month Michael Mbaru, maritime lead for the Kenyan government’s climate envoy office, told journalists that Kenya supports the NZF and hinted that other African and developing countries would follow.

“From the Global South perspective, as you’ve seen from the submissions from Africa, we are moving forward in terms of the framework as is”, he said, adding “we feel like we have compromised enough and we feel like the framework provides the best package.”

“If we are to reopen these discussions, we need to reopen them to strengthen the revenue, not to weaken the revenue”, he said.

Tacit or explicit approval?

Brazil’s Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned that even if the NZF is officially adopted in November, its opponents are trying to change the rules by which it comes into force as a “safety net to block” it.

The US and its allies want to shift away from a system of tacit approval where, after the NZF is approved at the IMO talks, its rules are automatically applied unless a certain number of countries object.

They prefer explicit approval instead, meaning it would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.

Critics say this change would give a small number of countries with large shipping registries the power to block implementation. Liberia has the world’s biggest shipping registry, which is run by a US-based company, followed by Panama and the Marshall Islands.

The Marshall Islands has long been one of the most vocal supporters of the NZF but, with its officials and its shipping registry income vulnerable to US retaliation, did not sign on to the recent Pacific proposal vowing to strengthen the NZF if it is re-opened.

Commenting on the chances of the NZF being approved, Smith said “there are lots of things which I think generally are much better and stronger than they were last year.”

“I can’t tell you now that that means we’re not going to have a difficult conversation and I can’t put odds on what the outcome is but I think things have improved on the energy transition question,” he said.

The post Prospects for global green shipping deal boosted by US tariff ruling, analysts say appeared first on Climate Home News.

Prospects for global green shipping deal boosted by US tariff ruling, analysts say

Premiums “have gone through the roof” and insurers have been leaving the state as the costs of disasters soar amid worsening extreme weather.

By Steven Rodas

Mary Creasman had insurance on her mind as she made her way to the California Capitol on Earth Day.

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Em Fenton is Senior Director of Climate Diplomacy at Opportunity Green, supporting climate-vulnerable countries in multilateral negotiations, such as the International Maritime Organization.

Governments are gathering in London over the next two weeks to advance the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in a global effort to reduce emissions from international shipping. The meeting may not make headlines outside climate circles, but what happens there matters far beyond shipping.

The international shipping sector underpins around 80% of global trade and contributes roughly 3% of global annual emissions.

The NZF represents the best, most equitable solution currently viable to address this issue and, last April, a large majority of countries voted to put it forward for formal adoption through the IMO’s process.

The framework is a compromise from the most ambitious possible design, but it still represents a hard-fought victory for multilateralism, with countries coming together to create a solution aimed at the global best interest and providing a solid foundation for a just and equitable transition.

It combines a technical fuel standard (setting emissions limits on the fuels used in ships) and an economic element that puts a price on emissions from international shipping.

A system under attack

With a global swing towards nationalism in recent years, some countries are increasingly placing domestic priorities over global climate action, despite legal obligations to act. And in doing so, they are overlooking the reality that abandoning multilateral decarbonisation efforts will ultimately exacerbate domestic challenges.

This trend is most notable the US’s withdrawal or removal of support from the Paris Agreement, the WHO and the UN Human Rights Council, but is also playing out in other areas, such as India’s decision to withdraw its bid to host COP33. All this begs the question: just how resilient is multilateralism in a period of intense geopolitical tension?

The system was built on two assumptions that now appear increasingly fragile: that countries would act through multilateral efforts in the collective interest; and that agreed action would be implemented at a scale and pace commensurate with need.

Coupled with this drift from its central purpose is an observable decline in its effectiveness across all five domains in which it operates – but most notably in climate action.

Because international shipping is inherently global and cannot be meaningfully regulated through unilateral or regional action, the IMO is one of the few institutions capable of delivering effective decarbonisation at scale. Failure to make progress at the IMO therefore sends a powerful signal about the limits of international cooperation more broadly, particularly on climate action.

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Within this context, progress has faced three distinct forms of resistance: rejection of the need for action, procedural delay or obstruction, and efforts to weaken outcomes to the point where ‘success is effectively meaningless.

At recent IMO meetings, these dynamics have become more pronounced, culminating in a successful move by the US and Saudi Arabia last October to delay the formal decision to adopt the NZF by a year.

The matter now sits in procedural limbo. This was further complicated by abstentions from two European Union countries (Greece and Cyprus), despite the broader EU’s support for adoption. Greece has subsequently affirmed their support for the US and Saudi position.

These procedural delays were accompanied by threats from the US administration of retaliatory measures, including tariffs, withdrawal of visa rights, or imposing fees on nationals visiting US ports.

Making the case for multilateralism

The stakes here extend well beyond shipping.

For multilateralism to remain meaningful, it must be able to produce binding outcomes – even when powerful states object. The IMO process is one of the few remaining forums where every country’s voice carries equal weight and no single state can exercise a veto.

If that process can be undermined through procedural delay and coercive pressure, it sets a precedent for other multilateral negotiations, particularly in climate governance.

This week in London, countries have a concrete opportunity to demonstrate that multilateralism still works – by being present in the room and actively supporting climate ambition.

This remains the most effective way to achieve climate goals, create the economic conditions for investment in the maritime transition, move away from an overreliance on fossil fuels, and protect the very foundations of multilateralism.

The alternative is not just a failure for shipping; it is a signal to every difficult negotiation that follows that obstruction works.

The post This week’s IMO green shipping talks are a test for multilateralism appeared first on Climate Home News.

This week’s IMO green shipping talks are a test for multilateralism