Calculating maritime shipping emissions per traded commodity
Transporting commodities around the world in today’s globalized production-to-consumption systems generates large amounts of greenhouse gases and pollutants, on top of those associated with producing the commodities themselves. Maritime shipping generated an estimated 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalent) per year in 2007–2012 (IMO 2015). It was also responsible for around 15% of anthropogenic nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions and 5–8% of anthropogenic sulphur oxides (SOx) emissions (Endresen 2003; Viana et al. 2014) – making it a major source of air pollution potentially affecting people in countries along shipping routes, as most emissions are released within 400 kilometres of shore.
