Working with Giants: A Brief Overview of the University of Southern California Sea Grant’s Work with the Ninth Largest Port Complex in the World

Abstract

Three-quarters of US trade and 90% of international trade are still moved by ships, and the global demand for waterborne trade is expected to more than double by 2025 (USCG, 2018). The adjacent Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach constitute the largest port complex in the United States, the ninth largest in the world, handling over $500 billion US dollars in cargo and nearly 19 million shipping containers annually (POLA, 2023; POLB, 2023). What may seem like chaos at first glance is actually a highly choreographed dance. A network of one million regional jobs and close to four million national jobs support this interconnected system of football-field-sized container ships, oil tankers, carriers with thousands of imported cars, over one hundred sky-scraping cranes, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of miles of train rails. (POLA and POLB, 2020; POLA, 2023; POLB, 2023). In this dance, speed is time, and time is money. However, being bigger and faster comes at a cost—burning more diesel fuel, generating more greenhouse gas emissions, and threatening several species of endangered whales.