The carbon cost of rerouting: Counterfactual evidence on the Red Sea shipping crisis from monthly operator-level emissions of 140 economies
Rota değişikliğinin karbon maliyeti: 140 ekonominin aylık işletmeci düzeyindeki emisyonlarından Kızıldeniz denizcilik krizine ilişkin karşı-olgusal kanıt
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Abstract
From December 2023, attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea diverted much of the Asia–Europe trade around the Cape of Good Hope. This paper estimates the effect of the diversions on CO₂ emissions from shipping, using the OECD's monthly estimates that allocate emissions to the economy of residence of the ship operator for 140 economies between January 2019 and June 2026. For each economy and for regional and world aggregates, I construct counterfactual paths with exponential smoothing and a combination of statistical models estimated on pre-crisis data, and I benchmark the crisis-period gap against the gaps at 13 placebo origins before the crisis. In the first twelve months, emissions of the 140 economies exceeded the counterfactual by 50 Mt (5.6%), about ten times the average placebo gap; the excess persisted through mid-2026. The effect was concentrated: operators resident in Europe and Asia accounted for 45.5 of the 48.5 Mt of economy-level excess, whereas operators in the Americas and Oceania showed no increase. Among the 20 largest emitters, the excess was large and significant for economies that host major container lines, such as Switzerland, France, Denmark, Singapore and Germany (11–23%), and small for tanker- and bulk-dominated fleets such as Greece, Norway and Japan. In emissions-weighted regressions, the excess rose with the container share of the national fleet. The results quantify a climate cost of chokepoint disruption that falls on a few carriers' home economies, with implications for the EU ETS and for maritime decarbonisation policy.
Keywords
Red Sea crisis; Shipping emissions; Rerouting; Counterfactual forecasting; Placebo inference; Container shipping; Maritime chokepoints
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