皇家华人

Since UCL Energy Institute鈥檚 shipping map 鈥� 鈥� 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鈥檛 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 鈥� more than the whole of the UK, Canada or Brazil emits in a year.

鈥淭he Paris Climate Summit set targets for countries, but it left out the supranational problems, such as shipping, which the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) controls,鈥� says Smith. 鈥淭he problem is that shipping doesn鈥檛 have a comprehensive plan for controlling its GHG emissions.鈥�

Revealing the extraordinary extent of modern shipping鈥檚 reach was a motivation behind ship map. 鈥淪hipping makes globalisation happen,鈥� says Smith. 鈥淲e wanted to start a public debate and the map has helped us talk to people outside of the shipping bubble.鈥�

A collaboration between the Energy Institute and digital journalism studio , and funded by the European Climate Foundation, the map reveals the extraordinary extent of modern shipping鈥檚 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鈥檚 commercial shipping fleet over the course of the year 2012.