Use of AIS data for the environmental characterization of world cruise ship traffic

Abstract

Cruise tourism industry has experienced significant global growth in recent years in terms of new passengers, fleet size, ports visited, and economic value. Therefore, the main environmental impacts resulting from this activity such as exhaust emissions, wastewater discharges, and solid waste should be researched since most of them can be released directly into the ocean and atmosphere. This study develops a methodology that combines automatic identification system (AIS) data as well as reports belonging to different companies and environmental agencies, in order to assess environmental pressures related to global cruises’ traffic along their paths. Three innovative indexes are proposed to help assess environmental impacts of world cruise fleet (equivalent fulltime navigation vessel, areal cruise traffic pressure, and route cruise traffic pressure), displaying the most crowded routes by unit of length and water masses by unit of area. This methodology can allocate hot spots of activity and quantify the production of waste and emissions worldwide. Moreover, the results from the proposed method allow calculating the world cruise fleet production (2015–2017), resulting in the last year studied in 23 Mt·year−1 of CO2 and 34 hm3·year−1 of wastewater, in addition to many other calculated wastes.