New open-access tool shows IMO delegations what the NZF policy options could mean for trade costs in their country
The UCL NZF Economic Impacts Tracker extends the IMO's impact assessment with latest options on the table and to 136 countries, including 26 Least Developed Countries and 36 Small Island Developing States that have so far mostly only appeared in regional averages
London, Tuesday 10th November 2026 – Delegations preparing for the IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC 85, 30 November to 4 December 2026) have had to weigh the Net Zero Framework (NZF) without country-level impact data for many of the economies most exposed to both shipping costs and climate change. For many low income countries and especially Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, only regionally aggregated results have been available.
Researchers at the UCL Shipping and Oceans Research Group have released the NZF Impact Tracker to close that gap. Free and publicly available at www.shippingandoceans.com/nzf-impact-tracker, it lets users compare, for any country of interest, the likely changes in maritime transport costs and the prices of traded goods across a range of policy options currently under consideration, and compare those changes against the costs of climate change expected by 2050.
The tracker covers 136 coastal countries, including 26 Least Developed Countries and 36 Small Island Developing States. Building upon methods developed during the IMO-led Comprehensive Impact Assessment, it combines UN Comtrade data with 4th IMO GHG Study activity data to estimate NZF economic impacts on over ten million individual trade flows and across hundreds of commodities on the importer and exporter side of trade.
James Stewart, Research Fellow in Energy and Transport at the UCL Shipping and Oceans Research Group commented: “Opaque methods for the evaluation of economic impacts from international maritime policy have hampered observers in their ability to effectively weigh up the costs and benefits of alternative proposed policy measures. To address this issue, the modelling undertaken in support of this tool has been undertaken using open-access datasets in a simple and robust manner to transparently evaluate potential NZF impacts on states. Crucially, even when considering methodological uncertainties, the data demonstrates a gulf in magnitude between the potential future costs of climate change and those driven by even the most ambitious NZF agreement.”[
The tool also includes a dedicated page focusing on essential food commodities, given the concerns raised in previous meetings relating to NZF’s impact on food security. The tool outlines potential impacts of the NZF proposals on eight essential food groupings, for example demonstrating that imports of bulky and low-valued unprocessed cereals are likely to consistently experience greater increases in costs than other food groups. Countries more dependent on these imports may therefore face disproportionately higher increases in food import costs depending on the NZF policy adopted.
Yoseph Ismail, Research Assistant at the UCL Shipping and Oceans Research Group commented: “Giving countries the ability to not only assess their overall economic exposure to the NZF but also breaking these impacts down into commodity groups to understand what trade flows are driving increases in transport cost is a critical first step in understanding why some countries are more adversely affected and what mitigating actions can be taken to soften these impacts. This is particularly important in the context of food security. This level of detailed trade and impact data opens the door for further analysis of the relationship between trade composition as well as other well established contributing factors and increases in transport costs.” [
The findings from the tool show that not all countries are impacted equally across the NZF’s proposed architectures. Whilst previous work using global aggregation has shown the NZF ‘as is’ as the most cost-effective policy option, combining the various NZF architectures with detailed country specific trade data, significant variations in the cost-effectiveness can be observed.
These outputs and the underlying understanding of trade and shipping activity that they utilise have been developed and refined over a number of collaborations, including with Micronesian Centre for Sustainable Transport (MCST), University of West Indies - Caribbean Shipping Lanes (CSL) project, Caribbean Maritime University (CMU) and The PATNA Initiative, with funding received from UN Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation.
