Shipping in the Arctic – is climate change a game changer?

• Main Author: Lasserre, Frédéric
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: World Scientific 2023
• Subjects: Climate change; Sea ice; Arctic shipping; Destinational transit; Just in time; Tramp shipping; Liner shipping; Transports maritimes; Climat > Changements; Glace de mer; Arctic; Arctique*; greenlandic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/127023; https://doi.org/10.1142/9781800613225_0007

The advent of rapid sea ice melting in the Arctic, in the frame of climate change, gave rise to scenarios of fast expanding commercial shipping along Arctic passages. However, about twenty years after the emergence of such scenarios, Arctic shipping did expand but not transit shipping. This chapter analyses traffic based on Canadian, Russian and Greenlandic statistics with a view to drawing a portrait of traffic in their respective Arctic waters. The pictures, along with analyses of shipping constraints in Arctic waters, shed light on the opportunities and obstacles that orient the development of sea transportation in the Arctic. They underline that shorter distances are not paramount in the shipowners’ strategies but that destinational traffic, driven by the expansion of natural resource extraction, is the driving engine of shipping in the Arctic.