Transport & Marine
Do you wear runners, drink coffee or own a mobile phone? The chances are that these products cruised to you on a ship. In 2015, the global merchant fleet carried a record 10 billion tonnes of cargo, a 2.1% increase from the previous year.
Maritime shipping support about 90% of global trade, due to the size of cargos and their carrying capacity. Over 50.000 ships travel the world to deliver goods all over the planet. Therefore they travel huge distances, and on average, scientists have estimated these distances are as long as the way to go to the moon, only for one ship and in a period of a year.
According to a report from the European Union, international shipping contributes 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually. This is predicted to rise by between 50% and 250% by 2050.
Cargo shipping drives global trade - but at a steep environmental cost, generating three percent of global CO2 emissions. It may not seem like a lot, but if shipping were a country it would be the world’s sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitter.
But even if this transportation system is very convenient for humans, considering spendings in energy and the quantities transported, it has a lot of disadvantages, mainly, water and air pollution.
Ship freight, due to the lack of regulation, is a sector which use heavy fuels, unrefined. This fuel is quite cheap compared to what we use for our cars, but its impacts on environment are very harmful.
Scientists consider that the 15 biggest freight ships emit more sulfur than all the cars on earth, on a one year period, due to the weak regulations in this sector.
During a travel between China and Europe a freight ship will spend 10 000 tons of fuel, approximately, but even if this number is huge, compared to the quantities carried it represents a small amount of CO2 per kilogram transported. Therefore, it will be less impactful to use ships transportation than air transport, which is even more harmful for environment.
Type of Ships
Three ship classes accounted for 55% of the total shipping CO2 emissions: container ships (23%), bulk carriers (19%), and oil tankers (13%). These three ship classes also accounted for 84% of total shipping transport supply. Similarly, most CO2 emissions can be attributed to ships flying six flags: Panama (15%), China (11%), Liberia (9%), Marshall Islands (7%), Singapore (6%), and Malta (5%). These flags also have large numbers of ships registered to them and account for 66% of the global shipping fleet’s deadweight tonnage. Although all ships and flags have a role to play in combating climate change, reducing emissions will require addressing these major ship classes and flags in a way that minimizes both impacts on vulnerable states and potential competitive distortions.
Air pollution
Exhaust from ships represent a significant source of pollution in our atmosphere and in the air we breathe. Direct contributions to climate change through shipping activities and through the production of vessels and machinery is an increasing problem. The global shipping industry is believed to be responsible for around 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, which represent approximately 3% of the world’s total emissions.
These emissions comes from exhaust, of course, but are much more impactful than car’s exhaust for example. Indeed, fuel used in the marine industry is composed by sulfur, which is responsible of harmful effect on environment and health as well.
The Insight team take an in-depth look at Ship Pollution.
Water pollution
Every year, diesel, gasoline, oil and other toxic chemicals are dumped into the sea. For example, since 1970, over 10.000 incidents were reported, even if the biggest part is categorized as “small incidents”. Spills are part of these incidents and can have very harmful impacts on environment.
Large oil spills can occur when ships collide or strand and pierce their tanks, although the risk is reduced if ships have double hulls. Spills can also happen when oil shipments are transferred. Pleasure craft can also release oil into the marine environment when the wastewater is dumped in the sea and when fuel tanks overflow during refueling.
Cruise ships have been described as "floating cities" and like cities, they have a lot of pollution problems. Their per capita pollution is actually worse than a city of the same population, due to weak pollution control laws, lax enforcement, and the difficulty of detecting illegal discharges at sea. Cruise ships impact coastal waters in several US states, including Alaska, California, Florida, and Hawaii.
Biosecurity risks
Thousands introduced marine species have been recorded in unusual waters. The majority of these are thought to have arrived via hull fouling with the remainder through the discharge of ballast water. Hull fouling is the process where organisms accumulate on a surface in the sea. In the initial stages, organic material sticks to the hull and is rapidly colonised by bacteria and microalgae forming in the upper layer. This layer is then colonised by larger organisms such as algae, barnacles, bryozoans and worms, creating more complex fouling.
Over time, as the complexity of fouling increases, habitat is created for other organisms such as isopods and crabs. As a result, invasive species can be transported around the world by vessels with fouled hulls. Many of these species are relatively benign, but some have caused major impacts. Ballast water is used to provide ship stability. Water from one port can be pumped into a ship before its voyage begins and can be discharged when the ship arrives at its destination port. Therefore the expelled seawater can contain species from the originating port.
Noise pollution
Marine life is extremely sensitive to noise pollution. Because of their extreme dependence on underwater sounds for vital functions such as foraging and mating and the lack of any mechanism to protect them, underwater noise pollution is more seriously disrupting marine life.
Marine noise pollution includes everything from ship noise to low frequency sonar sounds used for submarine detection, to the sound of seismic air guns from oil and gas exploration, and commercial and coastal jet ski traffic. These noises, even if they are not perceived as dangerous for human kind, they can harm fishes and big mammals, like whales or Dolphins.
Kristin Westdal has been passionate about animals and the natural environment almost her entire life. Last year she was the research expedition leader on Oceans North Canada's Lancaster Sound Arctic Whale Survey. Currently conducting research on critical habitat, distribution and population size of the western Hudson Bay beluga population, she lives in Winnipeg when not studying in the arctic.
Effects on environment
Noise pollution
The effect of underwater noise pollution is more painful than any other problem for sea animals. Most animals are alarmed by external sounds (from human activities). Deaths may be due to migration to new locations, internal organ damage, and a general panic reaction to foreign sounds. Communication between marine animals is disrupted by underwater noise pollution. This means that animals, subject to noise pollution, are unable to call their love companions, search for food or even cry for help in such circumstances.
Many marine animals such as redfish, herring, eels, cod or blue whiting, show significant damage to their ears when they are exposed to human-made noises, such as gunshot or drilling for oil, even several kilometers away. Exposure to embryonic noise increases the sensitivity of fish to noise, increasing birth mortality and the development of genetic abnormalities. Migration to new areas not only affects the balance of marine diversity but indirectly humans. Decreases in the catches of many fish species such as herring, cod and blue whiting, particularly in areas susceptible to noise pollution from ships, have been noted.
Ballast water
Ballast water, when changed in different areas, can have severe impacts on environment. This process can keep species from a port to another and create biodiversity modification in a region. Fon instance, there has been severe damage to commercial fisheries in the Black Sea as a result of the introduction of an American jelly fish from ballast water.
Anchovies are endangered because of this jelly fish which can poison them.
But most of the time this ballast water has effects undetectable, because it harms species that have not a particular interest for humans, even
Almost everything we own and use, at some point, travels to us by container ship, through a vast network of ocean routes and ports that most of us know almost nothing about. Journalist Rose George tours us through the world of shipping, the underpinning of consumer civilization.
Public Health Hazard
A team of scholars researched how sulfur-related pollution from ships affects human health. Their team found that ship pollution causes about 400,000 premature deaths from lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, and 14 million cases of childhood asthma each year.
Solutions
So what can the sector do to rapidly reduce its emissions in the near term? There are many technical measures and operational improvements already being investigated in industry and academia. Here are five viable options, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that could help the industry cut emissions.
Operational measures including slow steaming (ships operate at slow speeds, reducing their fuel consumption considerably) and route optimisation.
Incremental measures (mostly short term) which would cause the sector limited disruption, but are able to reduce emissions per vessel by as much as 5%. These include improving hull design, propeller optimisation and waste heat recovery.
Renewable energy – in particular the use of wind-assist, or wind power, for propulsion. Examples include the work that Cargill and Wessels have done trialling kite systems, and the experience of Enercon and Norsepower who both installed different rotor designs on ships.
Energy storage through the use of batteries and cold ironing (the process of providing shoreside electrical power to a ship at berth while its main and auxiliary engines are turned off). This would enable the sector to decarbonise by allowing it to run off electricity produced via a low carbon grid.
Fuel switch to lower carbon fuels for propulsion.
The merchant shipping industry releases 2.2% of the world’s carbon emissions, about the same as Germany, and the International Maritime Organization estimates that could increase up to 250% by 2050 if no action is taken. Finnish company Norsepower may have a solution in the spinning cylinders they’ve designed for ships to harness wind power and produce forward thrust. The result is a ship that needs less fuel to travel the seas - a major boost to the industry that transports 90% of international trade.
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