Cruise News - Maritime News

Representatives from Arctic Indigenous People and environmental NGOs are travelling to Carnival headquarters in Southampton, UK on 24 October to deliver a petition of over 100,000 signatures, calling on the cruise operator to stop using heavy fuel oil.

Representatives from Clean Up Carnival Coalition member organisations – Stand.earth (North America); Transport & Environment (Europe); Friends of the Earth US; Pacific Environment (North America, Europe, Asia) – and Alaska Native and Arctic Indigenous communities will deliver the 100,000-person petition.

A statement said the “specific demand is for Carnival to stop burning heavy fuel oil, beginning in the Arctic, and eventually everywhere, and use cleaner, readily available fuel.”

A note circulated to media explained why the coalition was targeting Carnival. “Carnival Corporation — with its 10 subsidiary brands — is the largest cruise line operator in the world. Of the 26.6M people that went on cruises last year, nearly half, about 12M people, went on a Carnival or one of its subsidiary ships. What this cruise industry giant does sets the standard for the rest of the industry.”

Explaining what it wanted Carnival to do, the note added “We are campaigning to end Carnival’s use of heavy fuel oil in its global fleet, starting with the Arctic and Subarctic. The coalition is asking the company to step up to become a true environmental leader in the sector by investing in the development and implementation of clean, fossil-free shipping technologies, such as hybrid ships, efficient designs, and renewable hydrogen fuel cells.

“We are asking that they step up to meet their own ideals by taking immediate and urgent action to end their use of HFO globally, install diesel particulate filters on all ships, and switch to low sulphur distillate fuel.”

Carnival Corp is investing heavily in LNG use, with 11 newbuildings set to use dual-fuel LNG. It has also retrofitted many of its current fleet of ships with scrubbers.