Trends in CO2 emissions from China-oriented international marine transportation activities and policy implications

Abstract

The demand for marine transportation and its associated CO2 emissions are growing rapidly as a result of increasing international trade and economic growth. An activity-based approach is developed for forecasting CO2 emissions from the China-oriented international seaborne trade sector. To accurately estimate the aggregated emissions, CO2 emissions are calculated individually for five categories of vessels: crude oil tanker, product tanker, chemical tanker, bulk carrier, and container. A business-as-usual (BAU) scenario was developed to describe the current situation without additional mitigation policies, whilst three alternative scenarios were developed to describe scenarios with various accelerated improvements of the key factors. The aggregated CO2 emissions are predicted to reach 419.97 Mt under the BAU scenario, and 258.47 Mt under the optimal case, AD3. These predictions are 4.5 times and 2.8 times that of the aggregated emissions in 2007. Our analysis suggests that regulations for monitoring, reporting, and verifying the activities of vessels should be proposed, in order to quantify the CO2 emissions of marine transportation activities in Chinese territorial waters. In the long-term future, mitigation policies should be employed to reduce CO2 emissions from the marine trade sector and to address the climatic impact of shipping.