An owner sizing a dual-fuel newbuilding or a major efficiency retrofit is working against a published calendar: the IMO commitment to net-zero by or around 2050, the EU trading scheme, the carbon intensity rules already in force. The people who would lend against that vessel are ranking a different set of conditions, and they put the cost of raising the money at the top of it, in first place both for what matters and for what currently works least well.
Jau Yang Liu, in a 2026 paper in Transportation Research Part D, put nineteen conditions in maritime decarbonisation finance to 52 practitioners and asked them to rate each one twice, on how much it matters and on how well it works today. Respondents came from shipping and logistics companies, financial institutions and maritime service providers, just over half based in Asia and a third in Europe, with 38.5 percent carrying more than fifteen years in the field. They were also asked how strongly each condition moves the others, which is the part that separates the result from an ordinary priority survey.
On a five-point scale, the cost of issuing capital rates 4.42 for importance against 3.01 for current performance. Auditable emissions data follows at 4.38 against 3.05, market liquidity at 4.35 against 3.18, and risk-sharing capacity at 4.31 against 3.22.
The instruments in view are the ones the study’s source material covers: the EU Green Bond Regulation, the ICMA Green Bond Principles and the disclosure material behind the Poseidon Principles. For a shipowner the practical content of a 3.01 on issuance cost is that raising capital against a decarbonisation case carries an arranging, certification and verification burden that the people doing it rate as working poorly.
Policy incentives rate 4.28 for importance, within 0.14 of the top of the list, so the regulatory layer registers as nearly as important as the cost of the money. The two differ in position. Respondents rated the financing and verification conditions as things that move the rest of the system, and rated the incentive regime, supervisory enforcement and charterer pressure as things the rest of the system moves.
Data transparency ranking second is the least intuitive part of the result and the most operationally concrete. Sustainability-linked lending prices on evidenced emissions performance, so an owner with instrumented, auditable consumption data can put forward a case that an owner working from annual estimates cannot, whatever the two vessels actually emit. The monitoring and digital reporting systems that produce that evidence rate 4.25 against 3.35, the narrowest gap among the conditions reported and the one respondents judged closest to working as it should.
The effect is to put a capital-cost argument next to the compliance argument for the same equipment. A monitoring system installed to satisfy a reporting obligation and a monitoring system installed to support a margin negotiation are the same box, and the second use is the one the survey ranks highly.
Liu reads a sequence out of the influence ratings. The cost of capital, the depth of the market, risk-sharing capacity and verifiable data come first. Wider investor participation and the absorption of technology risk follow, once capital can be priced and the uncertainty around it has narrowed. Incentive regimes, enforcement and charterer pressure come third, at the point where tightening reinforces conditions that already hold.
Run the other way, the same ordering says that regulatory escalation ahead of financial readiness raises compliance cost while mobilising little transformative capital, because the instrument lands on a market that cannot finance the response it demands. Liu presents this as a practical heuristic drawn from perceptions and declines to offer it as a causal model of policy effectiveness.
Every figure here is an opinion. The ratings record how 52 informed people rank the conditions and how they believe influence runs between them, and none of it measures what a financing instrument or a regulation achieved. Recruitment was purposive, through professional networks and industry associations, so the respondents were people already engaged with the subject. The sample leans towards industry, which Liu notes may raise the weight given to financial constraints against regulatory and social ones. Agreement between respondents is moderate, which the author reads as real uncertainty about a transition nobody has completed.
What the survey does establish is the ranking held by the people who price these assets and lend against them, at a point when the compliance calendar is fixed and the financing conditions are not. Whether that ranking matches how capital behaves over the next decade is a separate question, and this evidence does not reach it.