Port State Control and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

There is a strong link between environmental sustainability and maritime transport. With its enormous cargo-carrying capacity, merchant ships conduct more than 80% of the world’s trade. At the moment, no transport mode competes with shipping in terms of carrying the same level of cargo volume over great distances in an environmentally friendly and economically efficient way. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “it is estimated that, on average, a container ship (3,700 TEU) consumes 77 times less energy than a freight aircraft (Boeing 747-400), about 7 times less than a heavy truck and about 3 times less than rail. Equally, a ship (3,700 TEU ship) is reported to emit over 40 times less CO₂ than a freight aircraft (Boeing 747-400) and about 4 times and 31 per cent less CO₂ than a heavy truck and rail, respectively.”

Be that as it may, marine environmental sustainability would not be served better by comparing relative emissions ratios between different transport modes, but rather by a continued and concerted effort to, inter alia, control ship-sourced pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cut down on the sulfur content in fuel oil, control harmful invasive species, protect the polar regions, and enforce the sustainable construction, operation, maintenance, and recycling of ships. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a United Nations special agency, provides the framework for the adoption of global standards that will facilitate the attainment of these objectives. The keys to ensuring compliance with global standards are implementation and enforcement. One of the biggest challenges to this is the fact that a vast majority of the world’s ocean-going ships are registered and flagged in states the ports of which they do not visit. As a result, these ships are well beyond the reach of random inspections by the authorities of their flag states.

Port state control was developed and institutionalized as a complement to inspection systems administered by flag states. It was designed to act as a safety net that enables a state to inspect foreign ships that call at its ports, for the purpose of evaluating compliance with internationally agreed standards for ships. When carried out effectively, it is a random ship inspection regime that could be a sine-qua-non for the sustainability of world trade and commerce.

This Special Issue is dedicated to highlighting different aspects of the regime of port state control and focusing on its potential effectiveness as an enforcement mechanism to promote sustainability in general, particularly within the context of shipping operations, preservation of sensitive sea areas, biodiversity, and marine environmental protection.

We welcome your valuable academic contribution to this Special Issue.

Prof. Maximo Q. Mejia Jr
Prof. Dr. Aref Fakhry
Dr. Khanssa Lagdami
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• port state control
• maritime transport
• merchant shipping
• marine environmental protection
• ship inspection
• maritime trade
• sustainability