A new study conducted by British and Greek sustainability institutes, recommends four different scenarios for how international maritime trade might be influenced by climate change until 2050. The paper also presents adaptation efforts.
According to the report, the complexity of the global shipping system makes predicting volumes and patterns of long-term future international maritime trade a challenging task. This would be best explored by setting out scenarios instead of ‘precise’ forecasts.
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For this reason, the two institutes present four contrasting scenarios of international maritime trade out to 2050, regarding regions, countries, commodities, decades, which are consistent with high and low levels of global CO2 mitigation and associated climate impacts.
The scenarios expect trade to increase between two and four times the 2010 value by 2050. They are also characterised by low temperature increases and material intensity, which lead to the lower bound trade increase with high trade growth in bioenergy commodities.
Moreover, unobstructed production growth across countries, high temperature increases and material intensity, are the drivers to a quadrupling of trade across energy, containerised, dry and wet commodities.
In fact, the projected range is less than those in current scenarios and expect globalisation to continue with the forecasted pace.
The scenarios also project the highest growth presupposes both limited decarbonisation – in contrast to the Paris Agreement – and continued increase in expanding markets.
The scenarios therefore become a valuable policy and decision-making tool to address technological and operational change required of the shipping sector, if it is to deliver mitigation in line with the Paris Agreement
the report explained.
See more information in the PDF herebelow
