Climate change and inland shipping

Abstract

Although much attention is given to the consequences of climate change with respect to melting icecaps, starving polar bears, sea level rise and inadequate storm defense systems, there may be severe consequences for inland shipping too. Not only because of more frequent occurrence and longer durations of closed storm surge barriers, which may disconnect the free entrance for inland vessels to seaports, but also because the hinterland connections itself may change in the sense that so called melting rivers with a rather stable and predictable discharge over the year, may change in fast fluctuating and more unpredictable so called rain rivers. This may sometimes lead to higher water levels, which may give problems for the passage of bridges by (to) high inland (container) vessels, but what is more undesired are (long) periods of low discharge, which may allow only shipping with restricted shallow draught, which in turn may cause disruption of “lean and mean” logistic chains. There are many different type of solutions to anticipate to this future threats, such as better river management (think about retention basins in times of high discharge or in times of low discharge think about inflow from reservoirs, flow reduction by weirs and adjustable groins, extra draught by dedicated dredging), other more shallow ship properties, extra and/or shifted fleet capacity, other transport modalities, more accurate, actual and long term predicted river depth information, logistic buffers, extra stock, etc. An extra complication comes from the fact that some of these measures should be taken in the public domain by (inter)national government(s), local authorities, river managers, etc., while others are more or less the responsibility of private transport companies, producers or even individual ship owners. And most of them are believers of the law of up scaling more than downsizing! In this paper some results of the working group ‘Inland navigation’ from the project ‘Knowledge for Climate’ are presented and a few specific measures such as infrastructural adaptations are further investigated and scored against different criteria.