The Entry

That’s Ane Mærsk Mc-Kinney Uggla in the photo, the youngest daughter of late Maersk owner and CEO Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, when she unveiled the company’s first Triple-E post-Panamax mega ship in 2013.

The Triple-E, then the largest cargo ship ever built, marked a dramatic innovation in logistics sustainability, as it features fantastic green advances on several fronts.

From a resilience perspective, ships built with circular-economy reuse and recycle of parts and those that slow steam for higher energy efficiency, help insulate supply chains from climate events that disrupt shipbuilding and energy sources.

Tech-based and biofuel innovations hold even greater promise, for a segment that was actually excluded from the Paris Agreement.

More resilient shipping is one of the many recommendations of a landmark recent study reported last month by WIREs Climate Change on ways to make ports and logistics more climate resilient. The big take-away: most port managers have not gotten the memo and must wake up and get with it, FAST.

The Story

Implications of Climate Change for Shipping: Ports and Supply Chains

By WIREs Authors, Advanced Science News, 2 March 2018

Highlights:

• “This ‘inter-connectedness’ means that even a short-term loss of port capacity (e.g., due to a natural disaster) can cause local and global ripple effects in logistics and trade-dependent industries, such as imported food, energy, and assembled products.
• “About a third of the world’s ports are located in areas prone to tropical storms. There has already been major damage and disruption to ports from climate-related hazards, and such impacts are projected to increase in the years and decades to come.”
• The study found, though, that this is “generally not being factored into port management. Only a notable few have actually made the next step toward implementing adaptation strategies.”

Related video: thinking “decades ahead” and worst case on ports resilience