Port disruptions due to natural disasters: Insights into port and logistics resilience

Abstract

Ports are located in low-lying coastal and riverine areas making them prone to the physical impacts of natural disasters. The consequential disruptions can potentially propagate through supply chains, resulting in widespread economic losses. Previous studies to quantify the risks of port disruptions have adopted various modelling assumptions about the resilience of individual ports and marine network logistics. However, limited empirical evidence is available to validate these modelling assumptions or to provide deeper understanding of the ways in which operations are adapted during and after disruptions. Here, we use vessel tracking data to analyse past port disruptions due to natural disasters, evaluating 141 incidences of disruptions across 74 ports and 27 disasters. Results show a median disruption duration of six days with a 95 th percentile of 22.2 days. All analysed events show multiple ports being affected simultaneously, challenging some of the studies that only focus on single port disruptions. Moreover, we find that the duration of the disruption scales with the severity of the event, with an increment of 1.0m storm surge or 10m/s wind speed associated with a two day increase in disruption duration. In contrast to commonplace assumptions in model studies, substitution between ports is rarely observed during short-term disruptions. On the other hand, production recapture happens in practice in many cases of port disruptions. In short, empirical vessel tracking data provides valuable insights for future modelling studies in order to better approximate the extent of the disruption and the potential resilience of the port and maritime network.

Port management and governance in a post-COVID-19 era: quo vadis?

“…Port authorities are challenged to further strengthen their organisational resilience, leanness (Marlow and Casaca 2003) and agility (Paixao and Marlow 2003). In the post-COVID-19 new normal, port authorities will be expected to develop capabilities in port resilience planning (Shaw et al 2017;Vonck and Notteboom 2016;Verschuur et al 2020), adaptive port planning (Taneja et al 2011) and enhancement of ports' adaptive capacity (Notteboom 2016), so as to cope with economic shocks and trends and with the challenges imposed by climate change (Ng et al 2015). At the same time, port authorities might have a role to play in increasing the overall resilience of the port ecosystem and of the individual companies within it through for example financial instruments (e.g.…”

“… 2017 ; Vonck and Notteboom 2016 ; Verschuur et al. 2020 ), adaptive port planning (Taneja et al. 2011 ) and enhancement of ports’ adaptive capacity (Notteboom 2016 ), so as to cope with economic shocks and trends and with the challenges imposed by climate change (Ng et al.…”

Observed impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on global trade

“…We used real-time shipping data, using Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals of vessels (see Supplementary Methods), as a complementary data source and reflect on the similarities and differences between these observations and the modelled dynamics in Guan et al Maritime trade accounts for approximately 80% of international trade in terms of volume 7 , serving as an indicator of the status of the global supply-chain disruptions. We analysed the entire AIS database from the outset of the pandemic (January to June 2020) to track the quantities of goods moved by vessels 8 and estimate maritime trade flows at ports globally with an algorithm that we developed and validated (Supplementary Results and Supplementary Figs 1 and 2). We compared these data with equivalent data from before the pandemic (November to December 2019).…”

Ports’ criticality in international trade and global supply-chains

“…Such spatially explicit supply-chain insight inform economic decisions 23 . For instance, information on the port embeddedness in trade and supply-chains could help better understand the geographical distribution of trade flows across supply-chains 24,25 , connect environmental footprints with commodity flows 23,26 , predict future port demand, in terms of volume and space required, as economies grow 9 , allocate maritime emissions (~2.6% global greenhouse gas emissions in 2012) to countries and sectors 27,28 , and assess the potential supply-chain losses due to port disruptions 29,30 .…”