Led by the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the EU, the shipping industry struggles to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to align with the Paris Agreement. Clean Cargo, the leading voluntary buyer–supplier forum for sustainability in the cargo shipping industry, developed some years ago a methodology to calculate and report the GHG emissions from containerships. The recently introduced carbon emission requirements by the IMO and EU have reinforced the members’ interest in a new Clean Cargo reporting mechanism that enables a more effective and efficient monitoring of the decarbonization progress. A better understanding of the user needs accompanied by due consideration to the regulatory environment and the technological advances are key to build this new framework. This paper builds on the case of the Clean Cargo initiative to (1) identify the stakeholders’ expectations and motivations for voluntary disclosure of environmental information, and (2) discuss the governance challenges of voluntary initiatives. A questionnaire was designed and deployed to investigate the current uses of Clean Cargo data and the information sharing among different stakeholders. Voluntary schemes can speed up the decarbonization process by proposing standards accepted by all actors of the global value chain. Clean Cargo members envision reporting on absolute GHG emissions per shipment as the way forward.
The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is rooted in the Treaty of Rome. After its completion in 1983, the policy framework was gradually reformed through decennial reviews in 1993, 2003, and 2014. Due to geopolitical, physiographic, and historical reasons, the EU implementation of the CFP is most developed in the North Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea, and less developed in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. However, the CFP applies throughout European Union (EU) waters, which that are treated as a “common pond.” The CFP has been heavily contested since its introduction, and over long periods was characterized as a management system in crisis. Historically, the CFP has arguably struggled to perform and the policy’s ability to meet its objectives has not uncommonly been undermined by factors such as internally contradictory decisions and inefficient implementation. Since the turn of the century, the policy has changed its course by incrementally institutionalizing principles for a more environmentally orientated and scientifically based fisheries management approach. In general, in the latest decade, fisheries have become increasingly sustainable in both environmental and economic terms. An increasing number of fish stocks under the CFP are being exploited at sustainable levels—a development that is likely to continue, as fish stocks are coming to be more commonly managed along the lines of science-based multi-annual management plans. Consequently, many fishing fleets, particularly those deployed in northern waters, have shown good economic performance in recent years. This development has been further facilitated by the introduction of market-based management principles; in most member states these have been implemented by granting de facto ownership to fishing rights for free in the name of ecological and economic sustainability. This has, however, in many cases also led to huge wealth generation for a small privileged group of large-scale fishers at the expense of small-scale fisheries and smaller fishing communities, as well as society at large; this situation has led to calls for both a fairer distribution of fishing rights—to protect the small-scale sector—and for a resource rent or exploitation fee to be collected for the benefit of society at large, which is the true owner of fishing resources. Consequently, social sustainability, understood as the improved well-being of fishing communities and a fairer sharing out of the benefits derived from fisheries resources, should be a subject for the CFP to consider in the future.
The profile of small-scale fisheries has been raised through a dedicated target within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG14b) that calls for the provision of 'access of small-scale artisanal fishermen to marine resources and markets'. By focusing on access to fisheries resources in the context of the European Union, in this article we demonstrate that the potential for small-scale fishing sectors to benefit from fishing opportunities remains low due to different mechanisms at play including legislative gaps in the Common Fisheries Policy, and long-existing local structures somewhat favoring the status quo of distributive injustice. Consequently, those without access to capital and authority are faced by marginalizing allocation systems, impacting the overall resilience of fishing communities. Achieving SDG14b requires an overhaul in the promulgation of policies emanating from the present nested governance systems.
This study investigates the appropriate port governance model for implementation of green port management (GPM) practices. Relying on social systems engineering principles, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework considering four port governance models and five major GPM practice indicators. We validate the MCDM framework using survey data collected from top management executives of three ports in the Indian Ocean Rim — Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. We compare the Analytic Network Process (ANP) method with more recently developed Best-Worst Method (BWM) in analysis of the MCDM problem of finding the right port governance model for GPM. We collect data using the ANP and BWM survey in January 2019 and August 2019, respectively, from the same respondents. While participating in the study in January 2019, the respondents did not know that they would respond to the same MCDM problem using a different model, which corresponds to a repeated measures experimental design. In both analyses, we find that increasing privatization in port governance would enhance the implementation of GPM practices. Our study furthermore suggests that BWM is a reliable MCDM method with greater applicability than ANP, as it requires significantly lower number of judgement comparisons.
Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) requires the analysis of the spatial distribution of marine uses and environmental conditions. Such analyzes can be carried out with GIS, but standard GIS programs do not feature a toolbox that combines the most needed functionalities for such analyses. The SPACEA toolbox presented here was created to bundle and adapt existing functionalities in one toolbox. SPACEA consists of several script tools that have been designed to be user-friendly and applicable to different analyzes for MSP. This includes the processing of different input layers with regard to marine uses and environmental conditions. The main functionalities of SPACEA are exemplified in a fictional case study in the Baltic Sea, where the tools are applied to find potentially suitable areas for mussel farming. The tools feature a user-friendly interface and more experienced users may also use the provided sample codes to run it from the python window or as a stand-alone script. As such, the tools can be applied by users with different levels of GIS knowledge and experience.
Across Europe, countries are joining forces in order to implement European Commission initiatives as the Blue Growth Strategy and the Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning. Collaboration on how to perform stakeholder involvement as well as create cross-border solutions has become a key issue around the European sea basins and holistic spatial planning approaches similar to terrestrial planning practices are now being implemented in the marine environment. Among the sectors in marine governance is the maritime cultural heritage under water as well as in the coastal zone, where the example of the Baltic Sea Region illustrates how this sector has become an inherent part of the new Blue Growth discourse and the MSP-policy development across the region. In order to utilise this potential, support for collaboration and shared understandings within the maritime cultural heritage community of practise is needed. This research has focused on how to develop a spatially enabled digital and collaborative working environment to support the co-creation of new shared spatial planning concepts for maritime cultural heritage. The development of the platform itself has been carried out in a close cooperation with the actual users including cultural heritage experts, public authorities and research institutes in the Baltic Sea Region.
With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
There is growing evidence that the ecosystem service (ES) concept can provide valuable input to marine spatial planning (MSP), by highlighting which ecosystem goods and services can be produced from a planning area. ES link the underlying ecosystem processes and functions to the benefits humans can receive from ecosystems (the ecosystem cascade). In this study, we argue that the ecosystem cascade can be used to structure the stock-taking and future scenario analysis in MSP. However, indicators, which are needed for measuring ES, have often been applied in various ways to the different steps of the cascade. Here, we apply a consistent approach to sorting indicators into the cascade. The indicators are presented in an indicator pool that can be used to filter them based on the cascade steps, several quality criteria, and themes. The pool consists of 772 indicators, of which 735 were analyzed. In total, 252 analyzed indicators belong to the provisioning services, 314 indicators to the regulating services and 169 to the cultural services. The indicator pool offers a suitable starting point to select indicators for ES assessments within MSP. Using indicators at the different cascade steps allows the assessment of i) the ecosystem components generating the services and ii) the impacts on ES and their beneficiaries when changes occur in the provision of the services due to planning or management decisions.
This chapter assesses the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in ports and shipping. Insights from regulatory economics are used to identify industry characteristics under which the SOE model is expected to be effective. With the use of these insights, characteristics of ports, terminals and shipping services that may lead to the establishment of SOEs are identified. The empirical overview of SOEs in shipping and ports shows a rather large use of SOEs, especially in container terminal operations and port development. The use of SOEs particularly in port development can be well understood with insights from regulatory economics. The majority of SOEs in ports, terminals and shipping are active internationally. This raises important additional research questions, most importantly regarding the strategic rationale of SOE internationalization and the role of geopolitical considerations in international activities.
Although the concept of ecosystem services has been in use for many decades, its application for policy support is limited, particularly with respect to marine ecosystems. Gaps in the assessments of ecosystem services supply prevent its empirical application. We advance these assessments by providing an assessment tool, which links marine ecosystem components, functions and services, and graphically represents the assessment process and its results. The tool consists of two parts: (i) a matrix following the ecosystem services cascade structure for quantifying the contribution of ecosystem components in the provision of ecosystem services; (ii) and a linkage diagram for visualizing the interactions between the elements. With the aid of the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES), the tool was used to assess the relative contribution of a wide range of marine ecosystem components in the supply of ecosystem services in the Latvian marine waters. Results indicate that the tool can be used to assess the impacts of environmental degradation in terms of ecosystem service supply. These impacts could further be valued in socioeconomic terms, as changes in the socioeconomic values derived from the use of ecosystem services. The tool provides an opportunity for conducting a holistic assessment of the ecosystem service supply and communicating the results to marine spatial planning practitioners, and increasing their understanding and use of the ecosystem service concept.