Assessing the Impacts of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict on Global Sea Transportation: From the View of Mass Tanker Trajectories

Abstract

Sea transportation plays a vital role in global trade, and studying the impact of emergencies on global sea transportation is essential to ensure the stability of trade. At present, the conflict between Palestine and Israel has attracted extensive attention worldwide. However, there is a lack of specific research on the impact of conflict on shipping, particularly on global shipping costs. By using the global vessel trajectory data of tankers from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and taking the global sea transportation of large tankers as an example, this paper quantifies and visualizes the changes in global sea transportation before and after conflicts from a data-driven perspective. Firstly, the complete vessel trajectory, as well as the port of departure and the port of destination are extracted. Then, from the perspective of shipping cost and vessel traffic flow, we evaluate the vessel traffic flow changes caused by the conflict by using the route distance to replace the shipping costs and quantify the cost increase for the relevant countries caused by the vessel detour based on the shipping cost increment index. The research results show that after the outbreak of the conflict, the number of vessels passing through the Red Sea area has decreased significantly. About 3.1% of global vessels were affected, with global sea transportation costs of large tankers increasing by about 0.0825%. This study takes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as an example and analyzes the impact of emergencies on the global sea transportation situation of tankers based on AIS data. The research results reveal the characteristics of international shipping to a certain extent and provide guidance for global sea transportation route planning.

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