Calculating Maritime Shipping Emissions

The paper introduces a method to calculate maritime shipping emissions by combining shipping manifest cargo data with Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracking data. It demonstrates this approach using 2014 Brazilian exports, finding that shipping these goods added 25.99 million tonnes of CO2 to Brazil's reported emissions.

• The maritime shipping sector's contribution to man-made emissions was estimated at approximately 3% (around 1 billion tonnes of CO2) by 2012, with a potential increase to 20% by 2050 if the sector is not decarbonized.
• A new calculation method enables the attribution of emissions to individual commodities, vessels, trading companies, and countries by linking shipping manifest cargo composition with Automatic Identification System (AIS) data on vessel location, speed, movement, and draft.
• Applying this method to Brazilian exports in 2014 revealed that maritime shipping generated 25.99 million tonnes of CO2, which represents an additional 5% over the total CO2 emissions for Brazil reported by the World Bank.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2018). Calculating Maritime Shipping Emissions. https://www.sei.org/publications/calculating-maritime-shipping-emissions/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Calculating Maritime Shipping Emissions. 2018. https://www.sei.org/publications/calculating-maritime-shipping-emissions/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Calculating Maritime Shipping Emissions |date=17 September 2018 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/calculating-maritime-shipping-emissions/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2018calculating, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Calculating Maritime Shipping Emissions}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2018}, month = sep, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/calculating-maritime-shipping-emissions/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }