Schim Van Der Loeff, Wendela;
(2025)
Filling the maritime data gap a big data approach to aligning route-based maritime emissions, transport costs and trade.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Ocean-going ships carry approximately 80% of global trade by volume, equal to more than 10 billion tonnes of annual trade transported via sea. This accounts for some 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. A key barrier to abating these international maritime transport emissions has been the inherent difficulty of attributing responsibility as well as the threat to countries’ trade interests that any intervention might be. Furthermore, a lack of data to support the implementation of ambitious climate policy has impeded the sector’s climate objectives and has possibly even aided those countries with a bias toward low-ambition climate action. This study sets out to overcome this data gap and to identify those ship operations and geographies most susceptible to adverse and unintended impacts caused by global maritime policy changes. It builds a cohesive bottom-up dataset of the key characteristics associated with shipping’s environmental debate: emissions, transport cost and trade. With coverage, granularity, and uncertainty in mind, the study models the dataset as close as possible to the maritime network structure. The resulting dataset describes three years of maritime activity and it accounts for over 30 billion tonnes of maritime trade. The dataset’s novelty lies in its ability to differentiate carbon efficiencies of the maritime transportation of trade flows, and highlights those commodity-specific trade routes, which hold a high carbon penalty. It contributes to some of the key impact areas identified by the IMO as it helps characterise remoteness and connectivity and improves understanding of a maritime trade’s value and type, as well as its transport dependency.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Filling the maritime data gap a big data approach to aligning route-based maritime emissions, transport costs and trade |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10208589 |
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