Coal-fixed turbines versus diesel: an Australian context

This paper considers the economics of the diesel engine as against that of coal-fired turbines for ship propulsion in the context of the world energy debate. After formulating a generalized model of propulsive plant choice the model is applied to a particular Australian export trade.     

Hatchcoverless container ships: productivity gains from a new technology

The hatchcoveless container ship is an innovative design which improves cargo handling productivity. The paper develops a methodology for measuring the gains. To illustrate the impact of faster port times on voyage profitability a voyage cost analysis is used to show its operational advantages. An investment analysis demonstrates the value which will accrue to the company over the life of the vessel.     

Collaborative Integrated Management in Canada's North: The Role of Local and Traditional Knowledge and Community-Based Monitoring

The objective of this article is to take stock of integrated management in the Canadian North, assessing its contribution to the advancement of knowledge and practice regarding the role of indigenous knowledge and community-based monitoring. This is done in three steps. (1) The Beaufort Sea, designated a Large Ocean Management Area under Canada's Oceans Action Plan, is used as an example of a consultative planning process, with special attention to indigenous peoples. (2) How specifically can indigenous knowledge contribute to integrated management? The problem of Arctic marine food web contamination is used to illustrate the strengths and limitations of traditional ecological knowledge and its relationship to science. (3) The discussion of community-based monitoring relies on Voices From The Bay study involving the Inuit and Cree of Hudson and James Bay, and Inuit observations of climate change study in the Canadian western Arctic. The examples together address integrated coastal management and the health of ocean ecosystems, showing how stakeholder participation and knowledge helps widen the range of knowledge to understand and help monitor environmental change.     

How Are Our MPAs Doing? Challenges in Assessing Global Patterns in Marine Protected Area Performance

Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the conservation and development sectors have for them: conserving biodiversity and alleviating poverty. Numerous marine protected area (MPA) assessment initiatives have been developed at various spatial and temporal scales, including the guidebook How is your MPA doing? These management assessments have been useful to sites to clarify and evaluate their objectives, yet efforts to examine broader regional or global patterns in MPA performance are only beginning. The authors conducted exploratory trend analyses on How is your MPA doing? indicator data collected by 24 MPAs worldwide to identify challenges and areas for future work. Wide variability across sites with regard to the indicators examined and the constructs used to measure them prevented a true meta-analysis. Managers assessed biophysical indicators more often than socioeconomic and governance constructs. Investment by the conservation community to support collecting and reporting high-quality data at the site level would enable a better understanding of the variation in MPA performance, clarify the contribution of MPAs to both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation, and help drive better MPA performance. The absence of rigorous and consistent monitoring protocols and instruments and a platform to turn raw MPA monitoring data into actionable information is a critical but under-recognized obstacle to cross-project learning, comparative analyses, and adaptive resource management.     

Cargo handling productivity. Part 2. The findings

This is the second of two papers on cargo handling productivity presenting the results of the model developed int he first [1] which had been designed to test a productivity measurement method with cross-sectional empirical data. Four productivity measures were employed. Two related cargo handling to time, with labour brought into the analysis as an independent variable. The third productivity measure expressed total throughput as an aspect of labour productivity, while the final measure was a full productivity index developed by relating output to both capital and labour.

The productivity measurement technique demonstrated that this method can be used for cross-sectional studies and can cope with and allow for variation in non-controllable extraneous factors, thus proving useful for policy decision-makers in shipping lines and/or port authorities.

This paper presents the results of the prodictivity analysis for which the analytical design was decribed in Part 1. The first section briefly restates the productivity indices developed. The principal results and tests on these measures are present in Section 2 with conclusion following in Section 3.     

An economic assessment of fluidized-bed boilers in Australian merchant ships

Fluidized-bed boiler systems have sparked the enthusiasm of many in the past few years as an answer to many technological problems as alternate energy sources are investigated. Although still barely out of the experimental stage, ship designers are mooting the possibility of fluidized-bed combustion technology being applied in ship propulsion. This paper outlines briefly its process and discusses the economics of such a venture.     

Korean liner shipping in the era of global alliances

In the course of the last two decades Korean shipping has emerged as a major player in the liner market. In 1970 there was not a single container ship in the Korean fleet; yet, within the next two decades, shipping companies from Korea have become included among the top 10 liner operators in the world, in the context of a spectacular ascent of Asian companies in international container shipping. During the same period the organization of liner shipping itself underwent major changes. In the 1970s and 1980s, pools and powerful consortia prevailed, maximizing frequency and optimizing fleet deployment under pressure from the high investment entailed by containerization. The era of consortia, however, came to a close in the early 1990s; intermodalism and the expansion of the major liner companies into forward and backward segments of the transport chain rendered them inflexible for pursuing individual strategies of product diversification with a view to larger market shares. Global alliances were finally born as a result of a major reshuffling of co-operation agreements and of the globalization of the production process on the demand side. The aim of this paper is to follow and assess the options available to an aggressive low-cost national fleet in its journey to competitive maturity through a period of changing organization of liner shipping, focusing on the course of the leading Korean container company, and one of the largest in the world today, Hanjin. It highlights at the same time both the deep structural changes which liner shipping has undergone in the last two decades and the effects of current changes, such as the recent wave of mergers in this sector.     

An economic assessment of fluidized-bed boilers in Australian merchant ships

Fluidized-bed boiler systems have sparked the enthusiasm of many in the past few years as an answer to many technological problems as alternate energy sources are investigated. Although still barely out of the experimental stage, ship designers are mooting the possibility of fluidized-bed combustion technology being applied in ship propulsion. This paper outlines briefly its process and discusses the economics of such a venture.