Suez: could climate change also have played a role?

In yesterday's newsletter, I summarised the nearly 4000-year-old history of the Suez Canal. Today we added another chapter. The moon, the sun, the best salvage experts in the world (all Dutch), and others all worked successfully together to free the Ever Given out of its blocking position in the artery of global trade routes. 

Soon after, the hashtag 'Put It Back' became a trending topic on Twitter, followed by more memes. 

We won't put the ship back. But we should take some time to learn from what has just happened. And imagine what could have happened if the Ever Given would be a 'Forever Given' to Egypt, a situation where it would have taken months to unblock the canal.

Today, you were likely wearing something, typing on something, or burning fossil fuels that have passed through the Suez Canal. About 12 percent of the world trade by volume passes through the canal. We just witnessed that one ship, one mistake, or one extreme event can disrupt the global just-in-time supply chains. 

This event was a wake-up call to our vulnerability.

It raises the question if a similar disruption in world supply lines could happen again. I believe that if it was possible last week, it is also possible tomorrow. 

What worries me is a rising trend in increasing disasters because we are changing the planet's conditions, especially the climate. But other factors, like altered land-use or loss of nature, also play a role. 

The insurance industry, especially the leading reinsurance companies, were among the first businesses to raise the alarm about the increased risks due to climate change. They plotted two lines in a graph. The first one showed the increase in damages over the years caused by non-climate change-related events, like earthquakes. It was a graph-line that is slowly rising for the simple reason that we have more buildings and infrastructure that are increasingly valuable. The second line was the damages caused by climate-related disasters: like floods, droughts, or hurricanes. That line is exponentially rising, much faster than the damage caused by other tragedies.

Did climate change make this disaster more likely to happen?

Such findings make me wonder if climate change somehow played a role in making the Ever Given disaster more likely. Like airplane crashes, a catastrophe like this is most likely a combination of factors; one of those could be an increase in extreme weather. I just searched the internet but couldn't find anything about such a relationship. Let's have a look at the little information that we have.

Just after the disaster happened, there was speculation that 40-knot gusts and a sandstorm had impeded visibility. However, soon after, the Suez Canal Chief declared that "strong winds and weather factors were not the main reasons for the ship's grounding — there may have been technical or human errors." Still, I suppose that, whatever may have caused the blockage, official reports will mention the sandstorm as a factor that played a role. (Who will make that, or those, reports is a whole other question that I won't get into now)

The Canal Chief's comments raised for me the question whether sandstorms increase in the region and, therefore, increase the risk for incidents. I remembered that last year, the World Bank published a report about sand and dust storms in the Middle East and North Africa. I just looked it up, and one of the opening lines on the World Bank's website that introduces the report states:

"While natural sources such as the Sahara are the main contributors to dust storms in MENA, land-use changes and human-induced climate change has added anthropogenic sources as well." 

It further states that sand and dust storms impact transport and infrastructure in the region and that the anthropogenic sources (man-made, like climate change) have increased.

So did climate change play a role? I can't answer that question because I don't have enough information. If this has so far never happened to any other ship, and strong guts and sand storms are not a very unusual event, it is safe to assume that there must have been other factors that played a role. Maybe climate change played no role whatsoever. But I was surprised that I couldn't find any article or blog that connected these two in the last week's piles of publications. Let's wait and see what the investigations will find. 

Supply vulnerability

Some ten years ago, floods in Thailand disrupted the supply of an essential part for the Honda car factories in Swindon in the U.K. It was an example of how one disaster on the other side of the planet can stop producing a single essential part of a complicated product that relies on tens of thousands of pieces. For many weeks the factory worked only a few days per week. We have globalized our economy, but also our risks. It raises questions about our vulnerability. 

In the past year, we saw the devastation caused by a tiny virus that dies if it is twenty seconds in contact with soap. Now we saw the enormous impact of one single ship getting into trouble, resulting in blocking the transports of nearly ten billion dollars per day. 

Add to this picture the outlook for the decades to come. Extreme weather events will increase. And so will the world's middle class, which will ask for more consumption goods. Combine this with the pressure that humans already put on the planet's ecosystem. We can't keep on growing in our resource use, production, and waste on a planet that doesn't grow. 

These factors combined increase our fragility. I wrote earlier about the need to tackle climate change urgently and decisively. We need to work on many other fronts too, the Sustainable Development Goals that I recently wrote about are the best plan for our priorities until 2030. Working towards these goals and this Agenda 2030, we can strengthen our resilience to the impacts of all these challenges. 

The lessons from the past week

I hope we will all learn lessons from the past week and we should ask ourselves relevant questions. I know that I will. Is it normal that so many of the goods that I use come from halfway around the world? And that I throw them away after using only once? Why are these goods so cheap? Under what conditions have these been produced? Shouldn't I buy more locally produced goods that need less transport cost, pollute less, are fresh, and support the local economy. 

These are questions that I will come back to in The Planet. And I would love to hear how you think about these questions and if that changes your lifestyle.

That's it for tonight. I will now brush my teeth with a toothbrush from China, toothpaste from Europe, and sleep in a bed that probably also comes from far away. Small challenges to work on are all around. 

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