A new study which provides a detailed picture of emissions by using real-time data on shipping traffic, has found that South-East Asia’s coast have been enormously affected by ship traffic.
The authors of the study used an assessment model which analysed AIS ship data of more than 300,000 ships for the year 2015. The study, which was published in August in Atmospheric Environment, investigates the air quality of South East Asia, a region which is believed to cause up to 24,000 deaths a year. The three of the six most polluted harbours – Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai – are located in the region.
The highest emissions per unit area occurred in the following sea regions: Eastern and Southern China Seas, in the sea areas in the south-eastern and southern Asia, in the Red Sea, in the Mediterranean, in North Atlantic near the European coast, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and along the western coast of North America. The study also considered emission hotspots, by evaluating the highest emission densities within limited areas. The authors defined those as areas within a circle of 10 km, and found the highest emissions to occur, in a decreasing order, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Antwerp, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Rotterdam.
The study concludes that it is possible to analyse the global shipping activities using the AIS signals of individual ships, combined with modelling, to obtain results that are in agreement with the reported top-down fuel statistics. It is expected that the IMO Data Collection System and EU Monitoring, Reporting and Verification systems will in the future provide a good benchmark for fuel consumption modelling of the global fleet in the future. Both of these systems make fuel consumption reporting mandatory on ship level.
