COVID-19 Impact on Global Maritime Mobility

Abstract

To prevent the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), numerous countries around the world went into lockdown and imposed unprecedented containment measures. These restrictions progressively produced changes to social behavior and global mobility patterns, evidently disrupting social and economic activities. Here, using maritime traffic data, collected via a global network of Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers, we analyze the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic and the containment measures had on the shipping industry, which accounts alone for more than 80% of the world trade. We introduce the notion of a “maritime mobility index”, a synthetic composite index, to quantitatively assess ship mobility in a given unit of time. The mobility index calculation used in this study, has a worldwide extent and is based on the computation of Cumulative Navigated Miles (CNM) of all ships reporting their position and navigational status via AIS. We compare 2020 mobility levels to those of previous years assuming that an unchanged growth rate would have been achieved, if not for COVID-19. Following the outbreak, we find an unprecedented drop in maritime mobility, across all categories of commercial shipping. The reduced activity is observable from March to June, when the most severe restrictions were in force, producing a variation of mobility quantified between -5.62% and -13.77% for container ships, between 2.28% and -3.32% for dry bulk, between -0:22% and -9.27% for wet bulk, and between -19.57% and -42.77% for passenger shipping. The presented study is unprecedented for the uniqueness and completeness of the employed AIS dataset, which comprises a trillion AIS messages broadcast worldwide by 50,000 ships, a figure that closely parallels the documented size of the world merchant fleet.

Capitoline Dolphins: Residency Patterns and Abundance Estimate of Tursiops truncatus at the Tiber River Estuary (Mediterranean Sea)

“…However, in other Mediterranean sites [ 94 ], the abundance of bottlenose dolphins seems to decrease with the absence of trawling vessels, possibly because of the lower site fidelity shown by the local population [ 57 ]. Reduced disturbance by maritime traffic [ 95 , 96 ] and underwater noise [ 97 ] caused by the pandemic emergency in 2020 may have further contributed to an increase in the number of individuals in this coastal area.…”

Underwater Sound Levels in Glacier Bay During Reduced Vessel Traffic Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Near Vancouver, Canada, the pandemic-induced reduction in commercial shipping traffic resulted in 1.5-2.7 dB reductions in underwater noise in the 100 Hz band at three out of four hydrophone stations in the first 3 months of 2020, whereas the fourth hydrophone showed no difference in sound levels (Thomson and Barclay, 2020). Not all human activities or sectors of the maritime industry were equally affected during the pandemic (Ito et al, 2020;Millefiori et al, 2020;Yazir et al, 2020;Notteboom et al, 2021). In the Mediterranean, for example, decreases in shipping occurred more in coastal areas and lasted longer in sectors other than cargo and tanker shipping (March et al, 2020).…”

Soundscapes in the German Baltic Sea Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Maritime shipping, one of the stressors on the marine environment, was directly affected by the pandemic due to travel restrictions and the decline of commercial shipping. The sharpest decline in maritime mobility was observed from March to June 2020, when severe restrictions were in place globally (Millefiori et al, 2020). Vessel traffic decreased in nearly 44.3% of the global ocean and in 77.5% of national waters during April 2020 (March et al, 2020).…”