International Shipping and Carbon Emissions

Examining the global environmental impacts of international trade

A final project for Intro GISby Kate Gruzd

“Emissions from the transportation of goods across borders - all those container ships, whose

traffic has increased by nearly 400 percent over the last twenty years - are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their pollution impact.”

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

Context

• Shipping emissions = 3.3% of total global CO2 emissions.• Projected emissions ~6-18% within the next 20 years.• Most ships powered by heavy-duty bunker fuel.• IMO passed pollution measures, which call for a 10% emissions reduction by

2050 – countries against this measure include China, India and Brazil. (48-5 vote, out of those countries eligible to vote from the 169 members).

Project Proposal

• Create a map showing the most used international shipping routes as well as the most carbon intensive shipping routes.

• Spatially represent the areas of the world most responsible for the unaccounted for emissions released from the ever-growing international shipping business.

• Compare why certain highly-used shipping routes release less emissions then others.

Finding Data

• Shipping geodata sourced from National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis.

• Emissions geodata sourced from Fossil Fuel Assimilation System via the International Maritime Organization data.

Methodology

• Biggest challenge was finding data in the correct format, and then after that figuring out how to manipulate the rasters (no attribute tables!!) to fit what I wanted.

• GIS tools used (in order of application): Re-projecting, re-classing and re-sampling the rasters. Raster calculator to merge the two separate layers into one showing where the highest emissions & most used

shipping routes overlap.

• To the right is a snapshot of what part of my ToC looked like while manipulating the data to make it usable for my purposes.

Stages of Creation

Map after being projected, re-classed and resampled with a continents file added for clearer orientation. (Before narrowing the ports to the most used)

Initial shipping, emissions and port data without any processing

Final Map Design

Sources• “Shipping & Aviation emissions in the context of a 2°C emission pathway,” D. Lee, L.

Lim and B. Owen. • “UN Panel Sets Emissions Standards for Cargo Ships” via NPR. • “Infographic: Global shipping routes, mapped using GPS data” A. Nusca via

smartplanet.org.• “Geospatial Modeling of Ship Traffic and Air Emissions” C. Wang, J. Callahan and J.

Corbett. Via ESRI.• “CO2 embodies in International Trade with Implications for GlobalClimate Policy” G.

Peters and E. Hertwich. Industrial Ecology Programme, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

• “The complex network of global cargo ship movements” P. Kaluza, A. Kolzsch, M. Gastner and B. Blasius. Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment.

• “Transport, Energy and CO2” a 2009 IEA Report. • Various IMO documents.