Sustainability issues in maritime transport and main challenges of the shipping industry

Abstract

Considering the rapid development of oceanic logistics, the maritime traffic is one of the worst offenders for air and water pollution. This paper primarily aims to explore the key concepts and terms applied to denote the sustainability issues in maritime transport and main challenges for the shipping industry. The present study investigates the existing sustainability frameworks on the relationship between sustainability and maritime industry. Also the author proposes to use modelling approaches to measure the relationship between oil prices, exchange rate, services export and ocean transport value added. The empirical findings indicate that growth rate of the crude oil prices has negative impact on ocean transport value added growth, and it can be traced that the oil industry has a strong influence on value creation in maritime clusters and their competitiveness, especially on the shipping sector. The analysis also sheds light on the impacts of relationship between environmental pollution and maritime cluster activity (through the validation of the EKC hypothesis in Norway). The current paper reveals that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions. The empirical evidences show that the links between CO2 emissions and ocean transport value added are more significant than with energy consumption indicator. It can be assumed that, due to the energy efficiency policy and technological leadership in the shipping industry, the environmental impact of energy use (renewable energy) has improved.