Can Crew Onboard Ships Be Incentivised to Go Green? Understanding the Role of Incentives in Nudging Behaviour for Improving Operational Energy Efficiency

Improving energy efficiency of ships is one of the key strategies to decarbonise the maritime transport sector. Operational energy efficiency pertains to the ‘in-use’ efficiency of the ships which is directly related to the people that are involved in the operation of the ship, both onshore and onboard. This paper examines the measures available to improve energy efficiency from the perspective of onboard crew, the barriers associated with implementing the measures and how crew behaviour can be nudged to overcome the barriers using incentives. Speed reduction was seen as the single most important measure to optimise but also the most difficult to incrementally improve in practice due to several barriers including contractual, complex web of accountability and perverse incentives to increase speed. This leaves only a handful of other measures to optimise, such as trim-draft optimisation and auxiliary engine load optimisation, which have smaller efficiency gains, but when consistently applied through behavioural changes, encouraged through incentives, can lead to significant fuel savings over time. It is difficult to draw concrete conclusions on incentives, but preliminary findings suggest that there is room to consider alternatives to the current approaches, both monetary and non-monetary incentives were perceived to be important and going beyond the status quo of incentivising captains so that rewards are shared equitably amongst the crew.