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It's critical to understand the complexities of tightly bound actions and events of both people and nature, especially in times of crisis - most notably climate change and conflict between Russia and western countries.

Ports and neighbouring cities function as connectors between land and water and have long accommodated a substantial flow of goods and services. Port cities in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region and the Global South (GS) are rapidly and inevitably expanding as the demand for global trade increases. However, this expansion has numerous impacts on the surrounding marine ecosystem and the socio-economic livelihoods of local communities. We propose a framework to evaluate the sustainability of port cities in the WIO region and more broadly for cities in the GS. Through an exploratory approach, a systematic literature review (SLR) was undertaken to identify existing themes on port city and marine ecosystem sustainability indicator frameworks. The results revealed a strong bias towards sustainability publications designed for port cities in Global North. The approach developed from this study focuses on the socio-economic and environmental attributes relevant to ports in the WIO region and for GS countries. This draws from the Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) framework and includes 78 indicators. The indicators are designed to identify and report on the complex land and sea interdependencies of port cities. To test the validity of these indicators their interdependencies were examined through a Causal Network (CN) structure which identified 12 priority DPSIR CN. These were also mapped to the UNSDGs enabling the wider applicability and transferability of the framework. The resulting framework enables port cities in emerging economies to establish robust sustainable reporting systems and provides a framework that offers a unique lens for evaluating interactions embedded in the land and sea continuum.

As an important component of new western land-sea corridor, the construction of Pinglu Canal will effectively alleviated waiting time and congestion costs and enhance the reliability and resilience of the regional maritime transport network in the post-pandemic era in particular. From the perspective of competition and cooperation game, this paper investigates typical transportation routes from the port of Jakarta in Indonesia to the port of Nanning in China from the key factors of the changes in freight volume and the evolution of profits and subsidies, considering local government subsidies, environmental costs, marine emissions and other critical factors. The results demonstrated that in the centralized strategies adopted by two transport route operators, as the volume of goods transported through Pinglu Canal increased, so the corresponding profits increased. The increase in subsidies also contributed to generating the volume of freight through Pinglu Canal, but the social welfare under the decentralized strategy adopted by both transport route operators was more effective than that of the centralized strategy.

People are warned to stay away from the stricken Transocean Winner oil rig which ran aground during a storm.