Mapping 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and its Impact to Marine Ecosystems

Ballast water release, a mean to transmit invasive species across long distance via shipping, poses significant threat to healthy marine ecosystems by introducing novel pathogens and bringing the bio-invasion problem. As an environmental stressor caused from shipping, its impact should be incorporated into the goal of sustainable marine transportation so that ecosystems already suffered from higher risk of bio-invasion issue can take strict and necessary actions to protect themselves. In order to take account of shipping’s environmental footprint, a geospatial analysis of recent global shipping network would be necessary, especially under the effect of a mega-size trading and transportation network proposed by and centered at China, which is the Belt and Road Initiative with a marine component called 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

This study analyzes and maps out shipping dynamics from 2013 to 2018 under the effect of Belt and Road Initiative in order to identify the locations of most threatened marine ecosystems after acknowledging the importance of negative environmental impact from shipping activities.

The Introduction section of this paper explains the significance, origin, and background of 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, being as a marine component of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and involving controversies from political, financial, and environmental perspectives. The section provides some data and literature review to emphasize the expansive influence and substantial trading amount associated with Maritime Silk Road which is made up of vast shipping network. Also, Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) are introduced to be the unit of analysis for this study and their already vulnerable situations under rising human pressure are illustrated because industries like fishery, tourism and energy are active in LMEs due to their proximity to the coast and rich biological productivity. The bio-invasion issue brought from shipping is depicted while some past studies that used spatial modeling to assess regional risks are presented.

The Methods section is composed of data collection and data processing parts. The data collection started from world ports selection based on their involvement with BRI and a total of 63 world ports were identified as BRI ports for this study. Then, 6-year-shipping data from 2013 to 2018 between these 63 ports were obtained from the Global Fishing Watch database. LME shapefile was retrieved from the LMEs of the World website. Maritime Mobile Service Identities (MMSI) were used to filter our unidentifiable ships in the raw shipping dataset. For the data processing part, Microsoft Excel and Python were adopted to extract, organize, and filter data in order to map out shipping dynamic in certain years and around China, as a center of the network. ArcGIS Pro was used for the final data visualization to show a variety of shipping networks and the gradient of risks for LMEs across the global ocean.

The Results section showcases the 21st Century Maritime Silkroad with selected 63 ports. It includes shipping framework in both the global scale and shipping networks centered around China from 2013 to 2018. This section also presents two maps showing the degree of riskiness from bio-invasion threat for 22 LMEs that are associated with all the BRI ports. After analyzing 22,877 trips in 6 years, the North Sea, represented by Rotterdam port at Netherland, and ports around South Asia, represented by Laem Chabang port at Thailand, carried the most frequent shipping connections to China from 2013 to 2018. Two LMEs including South China Sea and North Sea were likely to be exposed to most novel pathogens since they had the highest variety of connecting destinations and external LMEs.

This study mainly provides a baseline for future analysis on how shipping would be affected under the influence of BRI, consequently creating more expansive environmental footprint to our marine ecosystems. Future studies can include an ecological and human health risk assessment to capture local community’s risk from invasive species so that both the marine and coastal regimes can be taken account into when designing for sustainable maritime transportation.