The World Bank today published new research on decarbonizing the maritime transport sector with findings that indicate significant business and development opportunities for countries, including for developing and emerging economies.
A healthy marine environment is integral to numerous New Zealand economic, social, and cultural values, including fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, and recreational and customary activities. The introduction and spread of marine non-indigenous species (NIS) via the vessel biofouling pathway may put these values at risk. Over the past two decades, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) has been proactive in commissioning research focused on the risks associated with vessel biofouling, identification of potential risk vessels, and risk management options. In 2010, MPI consulted on options to manage the biofouling risks on all vessels entering New Zealand waters. In 2014, New Zealand became the first country to introduce mandatory biofouling requirements. Between 2014 and 2018, MPI focused on communicating the requirements to support stakeholder awareness, readiness, and uptake. In parallel, MPI commissioned further research to investigate proactive and reactive approaches to biofouling management. Research outcomes were summarized and technical advice provided to inform stakeholders of what constitutes best biofouling management practices. This review summarizes MPI's research and technical advice on the risks associated with vessel biofouling and its management, and the procedures followed to produce New Zealand's biofouling regulations. The development of these regulations is also contextualized in terms of New Zealand's marine biosecurity system. The transparent and evidence-based approach followed by MPI provides a blueprint for establishing biofouling regulations. Because these regulations are aligned with the International Maritime Organization guidelines, there is the potential to develop consistent global and domestic practices for managing marine NIS introduction and spread.
China has deployed a network of sensors and communications capabilities between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands in the northern South China Sea. These capabilities are part of a "Blue Ocean Information Network" (蓝海信息网络) developed by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a state-owned company, to aid in the exploration and control of the maritime environment using information technology. The network constructed in the northern South China Sea between early 2016 and 2019 is referred to as a demonstration system. However, future plans for the Blue Ocean Information Network involve expanding the sensor and communications network to the rest of the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and other ocean areas far from Chinese territory. While the Blue Ocean Information Network is largely cast as an environmental monitoring and communications system, the military utility of its sensing and communications functions makes its development important to monitor.
ILA President Harold Daggett Warns Shipping Lines and Developers of Fully Automated Container Vessels That ILA Members Will Not Work Ships Without Crews Aboard.
In addressing climate change, the shipping industry, which is regarded as one sector that cannot be ignored in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, has become a key area of concern for the international community to achieve emissions reduction targets. The International Maritime Organization-the body that regulates international shipping-as well as the European Union and other international entities have adopted a series of emissions reduction policies, beginning a new era of shipping emissions reduction. In view of the urgency and complexity of this issue, the future policy direction of shipping emissions reduction and whether or not existing policies can achieve the emissions reduction targets have become the focus of attention in the global shipping industry. In addition, China's dual identity as a shipping magnate and a developing country plays a crucial role in the development of shipping emissions reduction trends, and reducing shipping emissions is necessary for China to achieve the "double carbon" commitment. In view of the above, this study endeavours to compare the current major shipping emission reduction policies from the perspective of international law and the perspective of macro policies, and analyze the future direction of international shipping emissions reduction policy. At the same time, the study identify China as one of the key countries to influence future policy making and proposes the position and path for China's participation in international shipping emissions reduction, which provided valuable contributions for China to participate in accelerating energy transformation, exploring participation in the carbon emission market, and promoting international unified shipping policy.
Maritime transportation is crucial to national economic development as it offers a low-cost, safe, and efficient alternative for movement of freight compared to its land or air counterparts. River and channel dredging protocols are often adopted in many ports and harbors of the world to meet the increasing demand for freight and ensure safe passage of larger vessels. However, such protocols may have unintended adverse consequences on flood risks and functioning of coastal ecosystems and thereby compromising the valuable services they provide to society and the environment. This study analyzes the compound effects of dredging protocols under a range of terrestrial and coastal flood drivers, including the effects of sea level rise (SLR) on compound flood risk, vessel navigability, and coastal wetland inundation dynamics in Mobile Bay (MB), Alabama. We develop a set of hydrodynamic simulation scenarios for a range of river flow and coastal water level regimes, SLR projections, and dredging protocols designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We show that channel dredging helps increase bottom ('underkeel') clearances by a factor of 3.33 under current mean sea level and from 4.20 to 4.60 under SLR projections. We find that both low and high water surface elevations (WSEs) could be detrimental, with low WSE (< -1.22 m) hindering safe navigation whereas high WSE (> 0.87 m) triggering minor to major flooding in the surrounding urban and wetland areas. Likewise, we identify complex inundation patterns emerging from nonlinear interactions of SLR, flood drivers, and dredging protocols, and additionally estimate probability density functions (PDFs) of wetland inundation. We show that changes in mean sea level due to SLR diminish any effects of channel dredging on wetland inundation dynamics and shift the PDFs beyond pre-established thresholds for moderate and major flooding. In light of our results, we recommend the need for integrated analyses that account for compound
With the opening of the national carbon trading market and the coming of the post-epidemic era, the government actively promotes the carbon quota policy to fundamentally achieve carbon emission reduction. This paper corresponds the shipping cycle to the shipping market demand situation during the epidemic, incorporates the shipping cycle characteristics and government quota characteristics into a multi-stage evolutionary game model. Later, the study analyzes the equilibrium points of the game parties at each stage and finally investigates the influence of factors such as technological improvement on the strategy choice of shipping enterprises through sensitivity analysis. The study found that the government's carbon quota policy is influenced by shipping market demand. During the peak shipping season, the government's quota policy is binding on shipping enterprises. In the low season of shipping, the binding effect of government's quota policy on shipping enterprises will be reduced, or even appear to be invalid. Therefore, the government should forecast the demand situation of the shipping market, gradually relax the regulation during the peak season of shipping, and strengthen the regulation before the low season of shipping. Shipping enterprises should increase the research and development of carbon emission reduction technology to reduce carbon emissions from the root to realize the sustainable development of ports and marine-related industries in the post-epidemic era.
Maritime transport is a major source of pollution of marine environment, which is the essential object in a series of international maritime legislations and various countries' domestic laws. Focused on protecting the marine environment, China has spent over 40 years developing the rule of law for marine environmental governance in maritime transport, including efforts made in legislation, law enforcement, and the judiciary. In this article, we attempt to examine China's experience and practice in the marine environment, explain the logic and consideration in relevant practices, and summarize China's paradigm for the rule of law for such governance. China has sought to resolve two major issues: the relationship between domestic and international law and the balance of interests between flag, coastal, and port states, offering a vivid model of marine environmental governance on which other countries can base their own legal systems. The findings reveal that with following and enforcing the international law of the sea, now China's domestic laws have form lawful authority on binding foreign vessels. China is continually strengthening the construction of its legislative system to harmonize inconsistencies and keep pace with international marine environmental law. To eliminate administrative inefficiency resulting from cumbersome procedures, China has reformed its maritime enforcement system by consolidating multiple administrations. China's independent maritime judicial system is meeting the demand to develop environmental specialization, enabling further exploitation of its profession in solving maritime environment cases and implementing environmental legislation.
In maritime logistics optimization, considerable research efforts are focused on the extraction of deep behavioral characteristics from comprehensive shipping data to discern patterns in maritime vessel behavior. The effective linkage of these characteristics with maritime infrastructure, such as berths, is critical for the enhancement of ship navigation systems. This endeavor is paramount not only as a research focus within maritime information science but also for the progression of intelligent maritime systems. Traditional methodologies have primarily emphasized the analysis of navigational paths of vessels without an extensive consideration of the geographical dynamics between ships and port infrastructure. However, the introduction of knowledge graphs has enabled the integration of disparate data sources, facilitating new insights that propel the development of intelligent maritime systems. This manuscript presents a novel framework using knowledge graph technology for profound analysis of maritime data. Utilizing automatic identification system (AIS) data alongside spatial information from port facilities, the framework forms semantic triplet connections among ships, anchorages, berths, and waterways. This enables the semantic modeling of maritime behaviors, offering precise identification of ships through their diverse semantic information. Moreover, by exploiting the semantic relations between ships and berths, a reverse semantic knowledge graph for berths is constructed, which is specifically tailored to ship type, size, and category. The manuscript critically evaluates a range of graph embedding techniques, dimensionality reduction methods, and classification strategies through experimental frameworks to determine the most efficacious methodologies. The findings reveal that the maritime knowledge graph significantly enhances the semantic understanding of unmanned maritime equipment, thereby improving decision-making capabilities. Additionally, it establish
The ocean industries are characterized by being export-driven. The exports of ocean industries (hereafter termed ocean exports) caused environmental pollution with amounts of CO2 emissions and thereby affected climate change. There is a need, therefore, for accurate assessments of CO2 emissions embodied in ocean exports-which can help policymakers adopt targeted emission-reduction measures to formulate sustainable ocean policies. However, few studies of ocean-industry emissions considered impacts in sectoral and trade pattern heterogeneity, especially from export perspective. To fill this gap, we measured and evaluated the export-embodied CO2 emissions from China's ocean industries, based on our newly developed high-resolution and comparable time-series environmentally extended input-output database, called EE-DPN-OEIOT. The results showed that China's ocean exports generated 94.3 Mt of embodied CO2 emissions in 2017, with nearly 40% originating from processing ocean exports. Regarding the evolution from 2007 to 2017, the total export-embodied CO2 emissions from ocean industries decreased by 7.3%, while the embodied CO2 emissions in processing ocean exports increased by 50.1%. From 2007 to 2017, the decrease in carbon emission intensity was the major driving factor of the downturn in export-embodied CO2 emissions across the total ocean economy and for seven ocean subsectors (60%), while the export-scale effect primarily drove the increases in CO2 emissions. Moreover, there were disparities in the driving factors behind changes in embodied CO2 emissions between processing and non-processing ocean exports. Based on our findings, we proposed three recommendations from a trade perspective to facilitate low-carbon sustainable transition of China's ocean economy, thus better fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal 14.
Maritime security is an essential component of national security, and the effective maintenance of China's maritime security urgently needs a complete guarantee of the rule of law. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the construction of domestic law on maritime security has undergone three phases: slow development, formation and refinement. Although the rule of law in the seas has been constantly improved, it has provided essential safeguards for maintaining China's maritime sovereignty, security, and rights and interests. It has facilitated the development of maritime undertakings. However, it still faces problems such as the lack of an explicit constitutional basis, the law of the sea is not an independent departmental law, the absence of the fundamental law of the sea, the lack of operability of marine legislation, and the existence of some gaps in marine laws. Given the problems with the current domestic law on maritime security, it is necessary to make improvements in the following areas: adding marine provisions to the Constitution, formulating the fundamental law of the sea and other marine laws, improving local marine laws, and introducing implementing regulations.
The importance of shipping in supporting and sustaining today's global society makes it indispensable to the world and to meeting the challenges of the sustainable development agenda, top UN officials declared today, as the international community marked World Maritime Day.
The importance of shipping in supporting and sustaining today's global society makes it indispensable to the world and to meeting the challenges of the sustainable development agenda, top UN officials declared today, as the international community marked World Maritime Day.