Monitoring of air emissions in maritime ports

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Monitoring of air emissions in maritime ports

Cammin, Philip / Yu, Jingjing / Heilig, Leonard / Voß, Stefan

Highlights • A case study determining real-world obstacles in creating port emissions inventories. • We model obstacles and motivations to support decision makers to understand and act. • Data confidentiality and weak information systems are identified as major obstacles. • Major obstacles hinder high-quality port emissions inventories and increase costs. • Legislation does not drive the collaboration between port authorities and tenants.

Abstract Maritime ports play a crucial role in the development of domestic and international trade and economies. Although near-port communities profit from economic benefits, there exist significant concerns regarding exposure to air emissions, which affect human health and climate change. To tackle this issue, a port authority can develop emission reduction plans and projects, whose performance is tracked through an air emissions inventory (EI). Despite the attention on EI methodologies in the past, little research has focused on the implementation of methodologies in information systems. Therefore, a case study is conducted in this paper to investigate the motivation for creating EIs and the obstacles in the EI-creation process from an information systems perspective. The results indicate that data confidentiality and weak information systems are major obstacles, which hinder the creation of high-quality EIs and generate additional costs. Our findings enable port stakeholders and decision makers to understand the current obstacles and facilitate the development of adequate information systems that support the creation of high-quality EIs.