Development of a standardized tool to calculate carbon footprint in ports

Abstract

Ports are essential contributors of a country’s economy. One of the significant environmental threats in ports is Climate Change due to carbon dioxide emissions generated by different activities in these areas.In the recent years many ports have started to calculate their Carbon Footprint and report it. However, generally each Authority or Operator uses its own method which makes the comparison of results very difficult. There is no single or unified method to calculate Carbon Footprint in ports.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the development of a practicable, user-friendly and free available tool with a standardized method for the calculation of Carbon Footprint in ports. This has been demanded by the port sector in different occasions (e.g. Greenport, 2018).The tool provides options to select the scopes that are more suitable and applicable to each port. In addition, the tool allows normalizing (standardize to a common ground) the total annual emissions in terms of total tons of cargo handled or annual TEUs. This is basically done to allow a comparison of the results of different ports on the same ground. The completion of this excel based tool is expected to be around 20 minutes (if data are available) and it is divided into three steps: Step 1: General data such as the port’s name, the country and the port total cargo are required. Step 2: The port should select the different scopes to be included in the calculation and the required data should be filled in order to get the final result. Step 3: By pressing the result button, a report is produced with the total CO2 equivalent emissions and also with emissions by capacity (Carbon Footprint) and by scope. This document can be saved as a pdf file.