The truth about shipping
The truth about shipping
Since UCL Energy Institute’s shipping map – shipmap.org – went live in April 2016, it has made more than a 100,000 twitter impressions and been covered not only in the specialist press but by the likes of VOX and Fast Co. So why all the noise about shipping?
According to Dr Tristan Smith, Reader in Energy and Shipping at The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy & Resources (BSEER), a better question might be: why isn’t there more noise about shipping? Around 90% of all trade is carried by the international shipping industry. This comes at a cost: CO2 emissions from international shipping for 2012 were estimated to be 796 million tonnes – more than the whole of the UK, Canada or Brazil emits in a year.
“The Paris Climate Summit set targets for countries, but it left out the supranational problems, such as shipping, which the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) controls,” says Smith. “The problem is that shipping doesn’t have a comprehensive plan for controlling its GHG emissions.”
Revealing the extraordinary extent of modern shipping’s reach was a motivation behind ship map. “Shipping makes globalisation happen,” says Smith. “We wanted to start a public debate and the map has helped us talk to people outside of the shipping bubble.”
A collaboration between the Energy Institute and digital journalism studio Kiln, and funded by the European Climate Foundation, the map reveals the extraordinary extent of modern shipping’s reach. To create it, Smith and his colleagues used the methodology they developed for the Third IMO GHG Study in 2014 and AIS data to estimate emissions from five different ship types. This was combined with 250 million data points to show the movements of the world’s commercial shipping fleet over the course of the year 2012.
Infographic
Download 'Critical Mass', our Annual Review data breakdown