Green Markets Day 2026 | ZEMBA’s Market-Making Momentum

Ingrid Irigoyen, Managing Director at GMA and founder of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance (ZEMBA), shared ZEMBA’s results since its founding in 2022 and its new home within GMA. She announced three new members, Google, Microsoft and DSV (ZEMBA’s 50th member), and celebrated ZEMBA’s selection as a finalist for the Earthshot Prize, introducing a short film about the alliance produced by Earthshot.

See below for a full transcript.

TRANSCRIPT

INGRID IRIGOYEN:
Hi, everybody. Hello, Ingrid. Let’s try it again. Hi, everybody. Thank you. So I love what David just said and I just want to repeat it. So standards and market instruments sounds like eating your vegetables, but system transformation, that is like dessert, right? That is what we’re all after here.

So I’m Ingrid Irigoyen. I’m founder of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, now managing director at GMA. For those of you who don’t know, ZEMBA was founded in 2022 by the Aspen Institute, Amazon, Patagonia, some of whom are here today, of course, Tchibo, and quickly joined by IKEA and many, many other freight buyer companies. And we’ve been close collaborators of GMA since the very, very beginning. So now joining the organization as of September 1st feels like a bit of a homecoming, a very exciting transition for us.

Like other programs at GMA, we work with freight buyers to set ambitious sustainability criteria for procurements. We run those procurements on behalf of our members. We set buyers and winning suppliers up with bilateral contracts. And we most importantly enable real on the ground, or I should say on the water, deployment of new very, very low carbon fuels and technologies.

And so really it is ultimately all about impact. And so what is the impact that we have had in the first three years of ZEMBA existing? We’ve got now 50 members. We have run two successful procurements. We have shepherded three new fuels into ships for commercial deployment, that each achieve over 90% lifecycle emission reduction, something that many believed was totally impossible a few years ago. We also have been able to execute over 40 binding commitments for two to five years of offtake of those fuels in very large container ships around the world.

Our next focus going forward will be on driving scale, getting creative about bringing the cost of e-fuels down. We know that cost is one of the biggest barriers. We will also be looking at expanding geographically, expanding into new technologies that may be non-fuel technologies, as Kim mentioned earlier. And then we’ll also be looking at some segments beyond container shipping because we know that container shipping is only about a third of the impact.

So how do we get to scale? Well, one of the important ways, of course, is to have more members. And so one of the things I’m pleased to announce today is that we have three new members who just recently joined. Google and Microsoft, those are household names, don’t need to tell you who they are. But I will just say a quick word about DSV, one of the largest 3PLs in the world, headquartered in Denmark. And I’m pleased to say that this year is going to be their 50th birthday. And they are our 50th member, so very pleased. Let’s have a round of applause for happy birthday.

And the other exciting thing I would like to share, some of you may also have seen this news, is that ZEMBA was just announced on Friday as one of 15 finalists for His Royal Highness Prince William’s Earthshot Prize. Yeah, I mean, we were, it’s — It makes me just feel choked up with humility thinking about it. We were selected from among 7,000 nominations from 169 countries. And the constant insecurity I have about, do we deserve it? You know, compared to all those amazing, amazing projects around the world, it’s truly moving for those of us who worked on this project for a long time.

And Earthshot kindly in giving us this status has also signaled a growing validation around the world and among some of the smartest people in the world that demand aggregation is a really important tool for driving climate impact in some of the hardest to abate sectors.

So I think this acknowledgement is really an acknowledgement of all of you in the room as well, because we have been building this approach together. It has been hard. Many of you have really dug deep. You’ve taken risks. You’ve done a lot of really intense technical work. You’ve eaten your vegetables on standards and market instruments. And so here we are with something that can really set us on a fantastic path forward.

Earthshot also kindly has produced a wonderful short film. You didn’t know you were coming to a movie premiere today. And so we’ll actually go ahead and play that for you right now. It’s just a few minutes, and it includes several images of me epically walking.

[EARTHSHOT PRIZE FILM]

INGRID IRIGOYEN:
Epic walking, am I right? So let me just close by saying that I was listening to some of the social media coverage of some of the other Earthshot finalists. And there was a finalist named Thomas Njeru from an organization called Pula in Kenya. And what he shared I thought was true wisdom for the moment. And I just want to repeat what he said. “The best innovations are the ones that give people the confidence to keep moving forward.”

In this time of headwinds, that is what we are trying to do. We are not going to solve these massive problems just with voluntary action. We know that. But can we create the goosebumps? Can we create the market uptake? Can we get the market penetration to start to bring the cost down? That is what we are trying to achieve.

And so Thomas was wise. And let me just say that if speaking of moving forward in headwinds, if I was able to not fall off that crane at 300 feet in heels with headwinds, we can do this.