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The declining cost of sea transport has been a necessary condition for the growth of the global pulp and paper industry, especially in regions remote from economic centres. Thus, pulp and paper industries and international shipping have coevolved, especially since the 1960s, enabling producers to tap global markets and develop global production chains. The paper products trade flows, however, have changed a number of times over the last 400 years. This chapter describes and explains these developments and shows how the technological solutions in global shipping and strategic choices among the pulp and paper companies have been interdependent, especially since the 1960s. peerReviewed

The pandemic outbreak of Covid-19 led to a sharp decline in demand for oil and historically low fuel prices. The very low fuel prices may lead to increased sailing speeds for certain sectors (particularly liner shipping), while product and crude tankers may wait things out until fuel prices increase again. A very interesting development is that certain ship operators sail around Africa instead of passing (and paying fees) through the Suez Canal, due to the low fuel prices that make this profitable. In response, the Suez Canal authorities offered rebates up to 17% for containerships from May through to June 2020. This paper reviews literature on the effects of canals in international shipping, and aims to propose new research questions following the impacts of the ongoing pandemic. The objective of this paper is to examine how canal authorities decided to provide financial incentives to ship operators for choosing to cross their canals, and assess the economic and environmental impacts of this choice. The methodology considers the use of an activity-based model to estimate fuel consumption, and calculate costs and emissions from the different options available to the ship operator. The perspectives of all stakeholders are examined. The importance of market-based measures and the external costs of emissions are discussed, with a forward-looking view for the implementation of the Initial IMO strategy for the decarbonisation of maritime shipping.

To mitigate climate change due to international shipping, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires shipowners and ship technical managers to improve the energy efficiency of ships’ operations. This paper studies how voyage planning and execution decisions affect energy efficiency and distinguishes between the commercial and nautical components of energy efficiency. Commercial decisions for voyage planning depend on dynamic market conditions and matter more for energy efficiency than nautical decisions do for voyage execution. The paper identifies the people involved in decision-making processes and advances the energy-efficiency literature by revealing the highly networked nature of agency for energy efficiency. The IMO’s current energy efficiency regulations fail to distinguish between the commercial and nautical aspects of energy efficiency, which limits the ability to mitigate climate change through regulatory measures. Policymakers should expand their regulatory focus beyond shipowners and technical managers to cargo owners to improve energy efficiency and reduce maritime transport emissions.

Freight and logistics are essential for economic and social development and are projected to grow significantly, but prevailing practices are unsustainable. This discussion paper explores the initiatives being adopted, implemented, and proposed in each of the three subsectors in a logistical chain, the maritime subsector, the interurban freight and logistics subsector, and the urban freight and logistics subsector. The paper describes the initiatives, and more importantly, how they may need to be adapted and financed to achieve the decarbonization of the freight and logistics sector, while meeting the needs, opportunities, constraints, and the broader climate change-related and development challenges of least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS). This report provides an overview of the main technical issues, commencing with the maritime subsector, then the interurban subsector, and finally the urban subsector. The report will highlight some of the interventions needed, and where possible the required policy actions and financial implications, with the final section proposing some final thoughts about the way forward and summarizing key recommendations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which workers employ rule breaking, rule bending and deviations from management defined norms in the workplace and the impact this has on their occupational health and safety (OHS) experiences.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with 37 seafarers working on board four vessels engaged in international trade. The data were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed using NVivo software.FindingsThe findings indicate that seafarers utilised workplace fiddles – which included rule breaking, rule bending and deviating from management defined norms – in order to engender a workable system in which they could remain safe but also profitable to those who controlled their labour. Moreover, the findings suggest that shore-side management deflected the responsibility for rule violations by deferring many of the decisions regarding features of life on board – such as the scheduling of work hours – to the senior officers on board.Originality/valueThe paper sheds light on where, in practice, responsibility for OHS lies in the international shipping industry, an industry in which workers experience relatively high rates of work-related fatalities, injuries and mental health conditions.

In an effort to reduce carbon emissions from international shipping, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) developed its initial strategy in April 2018 setting ambitious targets for the sector. According to the initial strategy, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from international shipping need to be reduced by at least 50% by 2050, and the CO2 emissions intensity by 40% by the year 2030, both compared to the 2008 levels. In order to achieve these goals, a combination of operational measures, investments in emissions abatement technology, and market-based measures will be necessary. The goals currently do not differentiate among different shipping sectors, and each sector faces different challenges. In this paper, we focus on short sea shipping (SSS), and on Ro-Pax services in particular that in general have not been examined thoroughly in the literature. We examine the emissions reduction potential of several measures, and we assess their efficacy compared with the targets set by the IMO initial strategy. The paper shows that the examined measures are not sufficient on their own to achieve the desired levels of reductions, and that a combination will be necessary, while technological solutions will need to be made more competitive through market based instruments.

International shipping is at a crossroads as regards decarbonization. The Paris climate change agreement in 2015 (COP21) was hailed by many as a most significant achievement. Others were less enthusiastic, and more recently American President Trump decided to take the U.S. out of the agreement. Four years earlier, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) had adopted the most sweeping piece of regulation pertaining to maritime greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, in the name of the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI). In addition, one year after COP21, the IMO adopted a mandatory data collection system for fuel consumption of ships and agreed on an initial strategy and roadmap on the reduction of GHG emissions from ships. This paper takes a critical look at the above and other recent developments and focuses on the challenges faced by the industry if a path to significant CO2 reductions is to be successful. Difficulties and opportunities are identified, and the paper conjectures that the main obstacles are neither technical nor economic, but political.

People attach much importance to greenhouse gas emissions, and there is an increasing concern on cost and emissions on account of speed reduction for international shipping. Low steaming encountered these challenges of time constraint and technical requirements, while the cost and emissions of railway transportation distinctly differentiate from international shipping and it is a good substitute for international shipping to some extent. Intelligent transportation system (ITS) has proven to be a useful tool in providing efficient, environmentally friendly and safe transportation systems within inland and shipping. The paper focus on the selection and cooperative process between the shipping and railway, and discusses the cost and emissions by speed optimization for international shipping and railway transport aiming to select effective and environmental transportation mode based on ITS infrastructure. Firstly this paper reviews ITS and investigates the relationship of cost and speed along with the relationship of energy consumption and speed respectively for shipping and railway transportation, and then presents the speed optimization both shipping and railway transportation based on ITS so as to minimize cost and emissions. Subsequently it compared and analyzed the cost and emissions for mode selections, and it found that it is more effective and environmental to employ railway transport to some route leg. Finally A numerical case is presented and the results showed that it is necessary to shift model from sea to land on some section

Classification societies play a major role in maritime safety and the regulation of the international shipping market. They have a dual mission, namely the classification and certification of ships. Paradoxically, the academic literature on the strategic behaviour of classification societies remains very limited. More often than not, the scope of prior research has been limited to the definition of their missions in the shipping ecosystem with an emphasis on their changing legitimacy as maritime accidents occur. Consequently, this paper aims at providing a better understanding of the specific role of classification societies in maritime safety and within the inter-organisational dynamics of international shipping. The study is based on a conceptual framework provided by the behaviourist approach and applied to the inter-organisational dynamics of supply chains. This approach enables in-depth analysis of actors’ strategic behaviours by focusing on four dimensions: power, leadership, conflict and cooperation. The main results highlight the increasingly central and paradoxical role of classification societies. This role encompasses, on the national level, classification and certification processes, and, on the supranational level, the creation of new rules and regulations. The study highlights the importance of their ability to master the official framework and institutional vocabulary, which enable them to strengthen their power and leadership in the shipping market. This capacity helps them to limit conflicts between actors and to encourage certain cooperative behaviours based on relationships of dependence and inter-organisational interdependence.

The International Maritime Organisation has set a goal to achieve a 50% reduction of the total annual greenhouse gas emissions related to the international shipping by 2050 compared to the 2008 baseline emissions. Thus, companies are looking for solutions and measures to align with the Organisation's goal. Marginal Abatement Cost Curves have been extensively used in the literature to rank several Greenhouse Gas mitigation measures based on their costs of reducing an additional unit of pollution. In this paper an expert-based, bottom-up approach was employed to construct Marginal Abatement Cost Curves for a globally operating ship-management company. Several mitigation measures were examined for the following vessel categories (a) Containerships 8000+ TEU, (b) Containerships 2000–2999 TEU, (c) Bulkers 35000–59999 DWT, and (d) Gas Tankers

The global sulphur cap is the final step in a series of regulations that aim to reduce SOx emissions from shipping. It affects international shipping and requires all vessels to use fuel with a maximum of 0.5% sulphur content or use abatement technologies that achieve a similar reduction in SOx emissions. The existing legislative framework poses several challenges, stemming mainly from a highly non-homogeneous and spatially differentiated system, with cases where the penalty fines are as low as the benefit that the violator enjoyed from non-compliances. The purpose of this paper is to develop a game theoretic modelling framework that improves the effectiveness of sulphur regulations enforcement and proposes a uniform violation fine system. A mixed strategy game with two players is formulated, representing the ship operator (who can either comply or not with the regulation), and an enforcement agency (that can opt to inspect or not inspect the ship) respectively. The proposed model can improve compliance rates and increase societal environmental benefits through reduced sulphur emissions. We also consider a new system with warnings issued for repeated violations of the regulation that would lead to a mandatory retrofit of the vessel with sulphur abatement technologies. Such models can ensure a level playing field for ship operators that currently have invested heavily in abatement options to comply with the sulphur regulations.

The Initial Strategy on reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2018 commits the IMO to reduce total GHG emissions of shipping by at least 50% by 2050. Though the direction of the Strategy is clear, the path to implementation remains uncertain. The ambitious IMO’s target calls for widespread uptake of lower and zero-carbon fuels, in addition to other energy efficiency measures, including operational and market ones. Using a triangulated research approach, this paper provides a critical overview of the main measures and initiatives the shipping industry can adopt to try to cope with the new IMO’s requirements. The pros and cons of the most popular emission reduction options are investigated along with the main challenges and barriers to implementation and the potential facilitators that could foster a wider application. The framework that is outlined is complex and not without controversy. Research can play a key role as a facilitator of shipping’s decarbonization by providing its contribution to overcoming the existing controversies on various decarbonization options and by developing a wealth of knowledge that can encourage the implementation of low-carbon initiatives.

Currently, the shipping industry is facing a great challenge of reducing emissions. Reducing ship speeds will reduce the emissions in the immediate future with no additional infrastructure. However, a detailed investigation is required to verify the claim that a 10% speed reduction would lead to 19% fuel savings (Faber et al., 2012). This paper investigates fuel savings due to speed reduction using detailed modeling of ship performance. Three container ships, two bulk carriers, and one tanker, representative of the shipping fleet, have been designed. Voyages have been simulated by modeling calm water resistance, wave resistance, propulsion efficiency, and engine limits. Six ships have been simulated in various weather conditions at different speeds. Potential fuel savings have been estimated for a range of speed reductions in realistic weather. It is concluded that the common assumption of cubic speed-power relation can cause a significant error in the estimation of bunker consumption. Simulations in different seasons have revealed that fuel savings due to speed reduction are highly weather dependent. Therefore, a simple way to include the effect of weather in shipping transport models has been proposed. Speed reduction can lead to an increase in the number of ships to fulfill the transport demand. Therefore, the emission reduction potential of speed reduction strategy, after accounting for the additional ships, has been studied. Surprisingly, when the speed is reduced by 30%, fuel savings vary from 2% to 45% depending on ship type, size and weather conditions. Fuel savings further reduce when the auxiliary engines are considered.

For determining the correctness of an import declaration lodged by a declarant within international shipping, customs authorities rely on manual cross-validation of the declaration with other trade documents. However, the sheer volume of import declarations lodged annually makes it impossible to manually cross-validate each declaration. Smart contracts have the potential to automatically aggregate relevant information from blockchain-based ledgers for lodging and cross-validation. In this paper we explore how such smart contract could be implemented. We demonstrate that a smart import declaration can be used to automatically aggregate information from different sources (e.g., pro forma invoice data elements stored on the blockchain ledger). However, technical and organizational considerations that are inherent to blockchain technology need to be addressed for the smart import declaration to be acceptable for both customs authorities and declarants. It is therefore suggested that future work focusses on data standards required to enable automatic aggregation of relevant trade information and the generation of the import declaration and governance of the smart import declaration by customs authorities to assure correctness.

Document fraud constitutes a growing problem in international shipping. Shipping documentation may be deliberately manipulated to avoid shipping restrictions or customs duties. Well-known examples of such fraud are miscoding and smuggling. These are cases in which the documentation of a shipment does not correctly or entirely describe the goods in transit. In an attempt to reduce the risks of document fraud, shipping companies and customs authorities typically perform random audits to check the accompanying documentation of shipments. Although these audits detect many fraud schemes, they are quite labor intensive and do not scale to the massive amounts of cargo that is shipped each day. This paper investigates whether intelligent fraud detection systems can improve the detection of miscoding and smuggling by analyzing large sets of historical shipment data. We develop a Bayesian network that predicts the presence of goods on the cargo list of shipments. The predictions of the Bayesian network are compared with the accompanying documentation of a shipment to determine whether document fraud is perpetrated. We also show how a set of discriminative models can be derived from the topology of the Bayesian network and perform the same fraud detection task. Our experimental results show that intelligent fraud detection systems can considerably improve the detection of miscoding and smuggling compared to random audits.

Trade barriers due to transport costs are as large as those due to tariffs. This paper incorporates the transport sector into a standard model of international trade and studies the effects of trade and industrial policies. Transport firms need to commit to a shipping capacity sufficient for a round trip, with a possible imbalance of shipping volumes in two directions. This imbalance is known as the “backhaul problem.” As transport firms attempt to avoid this problem, a tariff in one sector may affect other independent import and/or export sectors. In particular, domestic tariffs may backfire: domestic exports may also decrease, harming domestic export sectors and the domestic economy. This finding contributes to the literature on how import liberalization may generate a positive effect on the liberalizing country’s exports by identifying a new channel through endogenous changes in transport costs given the backhaul problem.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations deals with international shipping. Its primary purpose is to develop and maintain a comprehensive regulatory framework for shipping and its remit today includes: safety, environmental concerns, legal matters, etc. In order to achieve its objectives, the IMO has promoted the adoption of some documents such as conventions, codes and recommendations concerning maritime safety, the prevention of pollution and related matters. Many of these documents include the ship safety requirements. In order to apply them to ships, they first should be generated, prepared and recorded. This paper deals exactly with the origins of ship safety requirements. Depending on the safety requirement origins, the IMO actions can get the reactive or proactive character. Reactive actions are used in response to a particular situation being observed, whereas proactive actions involve acting in advance of a future situation, rather than just reacting. It means taking control and making things happen rather than just adjusting to a situation or waiting for something to happen. In the paper, development of safety technical requirements for ships is presented based on experience of the author as a chairperson of Polish department for Subcommittee of Ship and Equipment Design (DE) of International Maritime Organization.

China free trade zone is an important carrier of the Belt and Road to achieve the internal and external linkage. There are four free trade zones in china. They are in Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin and Fujian. Fujian free trade zone supplies greater openness and favorable policies for Xiamen international shipping center, and dispenses with the formalities, reduces shipping costs, and realizes the territory of the commissioner of policies. So it will be in favor of FDI and benefited for employment-generating. It will boost the economy and increase international trade. Firstly this paper found out the influence factors of Fujian free trade zone to Xiamen international shipping center through the investigation. Then index system of these influencing factors was designed. And then the index system was designed into a questionnaire. Relevant experts filled the questionnaire. Then the main influence factors and secondary influence factors were been found. The weights of each index were got by using the method of analytic hierarchy. At last, development strategies of Xiamen international shipping center were been proposed.

In 2008, 55 of the world's largest ports voluntarily adopted the World Ports Climate Declaration (WPCD) and the International Association of Ports and Harbours committed to long-term work on implementation through the World Ports Climate Initiative (WPCI). This article assesses the work of WPCI since 2008 and makes five recommendations that, if implemented, could support efforts to reduce the climate and environmental impacts of port operations and international shipping. In particular, as the impetus for the WPCD came from a port city – Rotterdam – and their engagement with a transnational municipal network – the C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group – the paper considers the role of cities and transnational municipal networks in governance, and the potential for cities to play a more active and influential role in the maritime sector. The article presents an overview of literature on the role and function of transnational municipal networks, the background and development of the WPCD, analysis of the work of WPCI, and a discussion concerning the potential of cities and transnational municipal networks to support and add value to WPCI or similar initiatives in the maritime sector. This informs the conclusions and recommendations to marine policy-makers and port stakeholders.

The main purpose of the paper is to analyze the impact of two nowadays existing global regulatory systems of the world maritime transport sector on international shipping industry and global trade development. The author has focused on the characterization of the autonomous regulatory system represented in this sector by freight market with typical for it mechanism as well as on public regulatory system expressed in form of the existing international regulatory scheme introduced by IMO and other international organizations. Both regulatory mechanisms has been analyzed and viewed in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of their influence upon shipping industry and global commodity markets. At the end, the results of functioning of both regulatory subsystems have been assessed with the aim to indicate how they are able to create growth potential for the world maritime transport and trade sector as well as the global economy.

Freight forwarders play a key role in moving goods across international borders. They arrange transport, oversee customs clearance on behalf of their clients, and more generally troubleshoot issues that arise while goods are in transit. This paper reports the results from a survey of 153 freight forwarding firms in Serbia. Respondents report on firm characteristics, operational choices, and conditions at the border posts and terminals where imported goods are cleared for release. One key purpose of the study is to investigate operational trade-offs between time and cost that arise when import shipments are in transit. In three of four hypotheticals, respondents suggest that money savings dominate time savings. Responses regarding real operational decisions such as route choices reinforce this finding. Respondents also reported penalty rates for late delivery of import shipments as well as the value of a typical import shipment. From these responses, it is estimated that the contracted value of one additional (unexpected) day of delivery time in Serbia appears to be approximately 1 percent of the value of the underlying shipment.

In the 3rd IMO GHG study the new data on the ships emissions indicate a clear need for improvements in ship energy efficiency in order to preserve the environment. Although the majority of the pollution originates from the international shipping, the environmental impact of the short-sea shipping, primarily from ro-ro passenger ships, should not be neglected. The pollution originating from these ships is especially pernicious for public health since they operate in and near ports and highly populated areas. The newest amendments to MARPOL Annex VI introduce the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI). The EEDI should be a measure of ships energy efficiency, but its application is limited since it may not be applied to ships with diesel-electric or hybrid propulsion systems. Also the EEDI seems not to be feasible for the regulation of energy efficiency for ro-ro passenger ships because their design criteria vary too much. The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to the EEDI definition for ro-ro passenger ships. It introduces the Reference surface as the function of ships capacity and speed instead of the Reference line. It also expands the attained EEDI calculation to different loads trying to give a clearer view of the ships CO2 emission. This modified EEDI would then allow a fair comparison between different ro-ro passenger ships.

This is the accepted manuscript of the following article: Mera, D., Cotos, J., Varela-Pet, J., G. Rodríguez, P. and Caro, A. (2014). Automatic decision support system based on SAR data for oil spill detection. Computers & Geosciences, 72, pp.184-191 Global trade is mainly supported by maritime transport, which generates important pollution problems. Thus, effective surveillance and intervention means are necessary to ensure proper response to environmental emergencies. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been established as a useful tool for detecting hydrocarbon spillages on the oceans surface. Several Decision Support Systems have been based on this technology. This paper presents an automatic oil spill detection system based on SAR data which was developed on the basis of confirmed spillages and it was adapted to an important international shipping route off the Galician coast (northwest Iberian Peninsula). The system was supported by an adaptive segmentation process based on wind data as well as a shape oriented characterization algorithm. Moreover, two classifiers were developed and compared. Thus, image testing revealed up to 95.1% candidate labeling accuracy. Shared-memory parallel programming techniques were used to develop algorithms in order to improve above a 25% of the system processing time The authors wish to thank the financial support provided by the ‘Deputación da Coruña’ under the ‘Bolsas de Investigación 2013’ programme SI

This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The journal is available at www.tandfonline.com Recent reviewers of the current state and future direction of business history have complained that, despite the growth of business history as a distinct academic discipline in recent decades, the field has tended to become side-lined in a number of debates which traditionally have been of major concern to business and economic historians. The paper discusses this issue by focusing on one of the major fields of research among economic historians and social scientists in recent years, namely the history of economic globalisation, and specifically the spectacular growth in international trade characterising the process. The history of economic globalisation and the causes of international trade growth has been a flourishing field of research in recent years, but business historians have not managed to make their mark on the major debates. We argue that one way of altering this situation would be to reinvigorate the old established link between business history and maritime history. We present two case studies showing how maritime firms played essential roles in putting in place vital organisational, technological and institutional preconditions for international trade growth. On this basis we argue that business historians of maritime firms are uniquely placed to understand the inner workings of the economic globalisation process and provide explanatory content to the macro oriented analysis dominating the existing literature. 2015-04-01

International shipping is an important emitter of greenhouse gases. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is discussing different approaches to reduce maritime CO2 emissions, in particular market-based mechanisms. In this paper, we assess potential implications of a maritime emission trading scheme (ETS) on the organisation and operations of shipping companies, primarily on the basis of a case study involving ship operators. Our results suggest that there is no knock-out criterion why a cap-andtrade approach should not work in the shipping sector in practice. A maritime ETS has the potential to engage this sector into cost-efficient emission reduction if designed to account for the special characteristics of the international shipping industry.

Container terminals play a critical role in international shipping and are under pressure to cope with increasing container traffic. The problem of managing container terminals effectively has a number of characteristics which make agents a suitable technology to consider applying. Container terminals involve the operation of distributed entities (e.g. quay cranes, straddle carriers) which coordinate to achieve competing goals in a dynamic environment. This paper describes a joint industry-university project which has explored the applicability of agent technology to the domain of container terminal management. We describe a simulation platform of a container terminal based on the JADE agent framework, along with two optimisations that have been developed and integrated with the simulator: allocating container moves to machines through negotiation, and allocating containers to yard locations through an evolutionary algorithm.

CO2 emissions from international shipping, which are currently unregulated, are predicted to rise from 2.7% today to 18% in 2050. International bunker fuel emissions have been excluded from any commitment in the Kyoto Protocol; the UNFCCC conference in Copenhagen also failed to bring about clear directions on how to proceed with these emissions. In this paper we investigate the various options suggested by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) of the UNFCCC for allocating CO2 emissions from international shipping to individual countries. We discuss economic and regulatory issues related to these options and the consequences of applying them. We evaluate the various options on the basis of environmental effectiveness, possibility of legal implementation, and fairness of burden sharing. We conclude that an allocation of international shipping emissions should be conducted on the basis of the operating company.