Climate Penalty for Shifting Shipping to the Arctic

Abstract

The changing climate in the Arctic opens new shipping routes. A shift to shorter Arctic transit will, however, incur a climate penalty over the first one and a half centuries. We investigate the net climate effect of diverting a segment of Europe–Asia container traffic from the Suez to an Arctic transit route. We find an initial net warming for the first one-and-a-half centuries, which gradually declines and transitions to net cooling as the effects of CO₂ reductions become dominant, resulting in climate mitigation only in the long term. Thus, the possibilities for shifting shipping to the Arctic confront policymakers with the question of how to weigh a century-scale warming with large uncertainties versus a long-term climate benefit from CO₂ reductions