Certification and Other Aspects

As indicated above, all the shipping related management systems, whether mandatory such as ISM or voluntary such as ISO 14001 and ISO 50001, have general features that are common between them. This is despite the fact that different systems focuses on different aspects of safety, environment or energy efficiency. Management certification is one way of demonstrating, in particular to external parties, that the company is complying with the above standards.

In shipping the main bodies that provide management system certification services to the industry are classification societies. As indicated by two examples [ABS 2012 and DNV 2013], class societies use integrated processes and guidelines to deal with all the above standards. For example, ABS has published a marked-up version of their guidelines on “Guide for Marine Health, Safety, Quality, Environmental and Energy Management” that shows how for example “energy management” has been added to the previously used guidelines that have been dealing with “Marine Health, Safety, Quality and Environmental” only.

Some class societies have published dedicated rules for certification of “ship energy management” that only deals with SEEMP aspect of energy management. Chinese Classification Society (CCS), in 2011, published their “Rules for Certification of Ship Energy Management” that deal with all aspects of certification including system requirements, data requirements, certification and energy audit for ship-board energy management.

On energy efficiency side, all classification societies provide services in “energy management system certification” and a number of companies have been certified so far. Being a new standard (i.e. ISO 50001), the number of certified shipping companies are not many yet. However, it is expected that with time and due to the significance on climate change debates, more and more companies will allocate resources to deal with energy saving and energy efficiency over the time (MariEMS 2017).