World Environment Day 2021: Spotlight on Maritime Future Technologies team

Today (5th June) is World Environment Day, a day encouraging awareness and action for the protection of the environment.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency is committed to playing its part in the global effort to tackle environment issues, with a key focus on decarbonisation and sustainability of the maritime environment.

The MCA’s Maritime Future Technologies (MFT) team, which was established last year to address some of the big challenges related to emission reduction and autonomy, is working to drive and support environmental change in the shipping industry, through active engagement and by supporting partners and academia with science-based research and environmentally-friendly technologies.

A growing team with 22 members – innovation is the important buzz word for MFT and goes hand in hand with the exciting project-led work that they are involved with. This includes supporting industry and business with new projects, with Maritime Autonomous Shipping being a good example.


Learning outcomes from such projects are helping to strengthen regulatory change now and in the future as well as challenging existing maritime regulation and promoting benefits to the wider environment.  

“I strongly believe that the MFT team are in a unique and fortunate position as we really are the interface between the MCA and industry for facilitating and implementing trials and projects which will really impact our sectors in a positive way,” Tom Skew, Maritime Emission Reduction Engineering Lead at the MCA, said.

“We have a great opportunity to provide quality data and sound perspective on maritime to decision makers, which in turn creates thought leadership and a positive direction of industry travel through engagement, influence and informed opinion.”

This year’s World Environment Day has an ecosystem restoration theme, with its global rallying cry centered on explaining how and why urgent action is needed to revive damaged and in some sad cases, destroyed ecosystems – from inland forests to areas of coastline.

The message is that a connected approach is required to ensure vital progress, with all industries having a crucial role to play.

“Moving towards a net zero carbon world is not an easy road to take and there will be future challenges,” Tom added. “From our perspective, we want the work of the MFT team to provoke maritime and its decision makers, towards a framework – or approach – for the industry whereby we’re thinking holistically, across all areas of requirements and criteria. This can really help ensure that we don’t create additional problems for tomorrow by narrowing our thinking today, allowing us to use this approach to solve issues now and into the future too.”

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