The United Kingdom is on track to become the first country to have legally binding targets for cutting greenhouse gases.

Delegates to a recent IMO working group meeting were unable to make progress toward an agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from international shipping.

Shipping is one of the most fuel-efficient ways to move freight, but the industry still produces significant greenhouse-gas emissions, including more than a quarter of the world's nitrogen oxides emissions. And it also produces more sulphur dioxide emissions than all land transportation combined. In the latest of Nature's our Future Transport series, Duncan Graham-Rowe looks at the new wave in shipping.

The International Maritime Organization recently revised the MARPOL Annex VI so regulations are clearer and nitrogen oxides emissions are further reduced.

Any serious attempt to deal with climate change must involve transport. Transport accounts for 13% of all world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, though this figure takes into account CO2 sources other than fuel combustion, such as forestry, land-use and biomass burning. A look at CO2 emissions from fuel combustion only shows the transport sector accounts for about 23% worldwide and about 30% in the OECD area.