Decarbonisation is stressing seafarers out – survey

The survey was conducted by the International Seafarers Welfare and Assistance Network (ISWAN), sponsored by the Shipowners’ Club, an insurance company for small and specialist vessel owners, operators and charterers.

The crews of tugs and workboats, merchant ships, cruise liners, ferries and others from at least 16 countries across Europe and Asia were asked how they were coping with the onslaught of demands being made ‘to meet the challenges of the zero-carbon transition’.

A smaller sample of shore-based staff was also asked, and responses mirrored those of seafarers, 70% of whom said the adoption of new environmental regulations was having a negative impact on their working lives.

“I am a big supporter of decarbonisation and taking steps to reduce our negative impact on the planet and our surroundings. I just wish it was done in a much better way,” was one of the responses from an unnamed seafarer.

While in general agreement with the principles, more than half of respondents said the increase in workload and fears over making mistakes were increasing their stress levels.

Bringing in a ‘no-blame’ culture would help the transition, 40% of respondents felt, and greater uniformity of regulations needed to be achieved.

With shore-based staff, the complexity of different regulatory requirements was cited as the top challenge by 60% of those asked.

“As was the case for seafarers, the tension between commercial pressures and regulatory requirements was the second most pressing issue, highlighted by 57.5% of shore-based staff,” the report says.

Their worries were also being overlooked, they felt.

Mounting pressures

Environmental rules have added a whole new workload onto crew, says Workboat Association CEO Kerrie Forster, although when it comes to statutory emissions reporting thst weon’t be a problem for a majority of small commercial vessel operators, as the current foresight is to apply this to vessels 400 tonnes and above only.

But because everything now has to be recorded, admin has become a daily bane of a master’s life.

“You now not only have to recycle everything, you have to prove you’re doing it,” Forster says. “Everything has to be written in logbooks; when they take the plastic waste ashore that has to be recorded and they need a certificate – it just adds to the workload.

“Ballast water now has to have a certificate.

“Vessels above 5,000 tonnes are now required to monitor the amount of CO² they produce. How each country is going to implement this and manage all the fines is not established but the requirement to record it is going to come for all ships above 400 tonnes.

“And then people in the office will blame the crew if they haven’t done the records correctly.

“Is a master’s job to sail a vessel from A to B or is it to fill in forms? It’s bureaucracy gone mad.”

Automation, which one might believe was the harbinger of convenience, is quite the opposite, Forster says.

Vessel owners want as much automation as possible on their vessels because it means they can cut crew size, quite an understandable aim in today’s chronic crew shortage scenario.

But it means that the skipper has to manage far more on his or her own.

“In the past you would have one person to look at the radar, but now they are not needed; nor is the helmsman, or the navigator – you have a bridge system that talks to itself, but the skipper still has to operate all that equipment by themselves,” he says.

“And just when you get used to that, the decarbonisation rules come along and we are told we have to change it all again.”