Atmospheric Pollution of International Maritime Transportation: Measurement and Cost Estimation of Trade-Lane Specific Container Trade Activities in Hong Kong

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction 1.1 Approach and Motivation: World transportation overcomes the distance between places of origin and places of demand for both passengers and freight. Almost three quarters of the world’s surface is covered by water and around 80 percent of the world trade by weight is moved in this mode. Offshore trade activities (confined to container trade) describe a synonym that features globalization. In fact, transportation including these activities is the least visible critical element in world economies. But the importance of environment has barely been discussed in the context of pollution performance from individual economies. As a consequence, trade-lane (confined to specific world sea shipping routes between individual ports) emissions, generated by economies, are not precisely reviewed by government agencies. In addition, the real amount and costs of atmospheric pollutions linked to offshore trade-lane performance are not entirely understood by consumers. Environmental awareness seems to be seldom raised in our society. In fact, the ignorance of mankind is the most important factor due to since appropriate information is very little available. Some emissions are contributing to a process of retaining the heat from solar radiation by the planet Earth also referred to as ‘greenhouse effect’. The greenhouse effect, which originally has a positive effect, because it makes the planet Earth warm enough to sustain life, is responsible for the increase of the global temperature which has quite apparent effects on our world. Melting sea ice effects and rising seawater levels are only a few examples. To be precise, freight transportation is responsible for approximately 25 percent of the total global transport emissions, equal to 1.65 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. With increasing global demand in commodities and goods the magnitude of transportation also rises, essentially addressing the consumer’s and industry’s need of delivering shipments with different, sizes, volumes, weight and requirements at the right place, to the right time, in the right quantity and to the right costs. From what has been said earlier it is curious why no generally accepted criterion to allocate international transportation pollution is currently in use. While diffident efforts were made to include these emissions in international conventions, CO2 emissions related to international freight are not involved in the pollution reduction goals of the [...]