Getting green onside

It seems as if the Panama Canal expansion has triggered a stampede for depth and capacity on the US East Coast, but the issues surrounding these major projects stir up more than the water column.

Ports from New York to Miami are deepening harbours or expanding terminals to pull in the big ships due to come through the Panama Canal in 2014. However, Chris DeScherer of the Southern Environmental Law Center is calling for federal policymakers to weigh up whether this really makes sense in terms of costs or pollution.

He says the Army Corps of Engineers, the body in charge of dredging US harbours, is allowing a dozen or more ports to pursue these projects in isolation from one another without taking an overall look at how much port capacity is going to be needed: its an issue since a previous chief executive of the Panama Canal Authority pointed out that the required extra capacity could possibly be handled by a couple of East Coast and one Gulf Coast port.

“The Corps seem to be wearing blinders,” says Mr DeScherer, “They’re allowing projects to move forward without looking objectively and analytically at how many ports really need to be deepened.”

Both Ben Hackett of Hackett Associates and James Corbett of the University of Delaware say they are ‘sceptical’ as to the amount of cargo diverted by the canal: Mr Hackett adds he expects “nothing dramatic” in the way of growth for the area “barring a closure of the Suez, which would leave no alternatives”. Further, Prof Corbett and his colleagues have analysed whether there are real emissions advantages to the sea route against the landbridge: “Many people assumed that a larger more efficient ship would be more ecologically friendly – but the results of our study show that there’s very little net difference in net multimodal emissions, even though there is a substantial train and truck footprint change,” he says.

Although Mr Hackett says that most ports these days have a general, pragmatic need to scale up, Mr Corbett warns against an US East Coast race for depth and capacity based mainly on diversion assumptions, saying that a “long term, realistic and inclusive view” is needed as a voyage through the Panama Canal is not going to be a universal answer.

“Ports cannot simply invest in the new capacity and hope that an immediate diversion will occur,” says Mr Corbett. “However, intelligent investment inside the gates could catalyse green corridors and draw cargo through.” In other words, those that will win will not be stacking measures to bring the ships in against environmental stewardship.

The Canal is not the source of all change however; there are other factors to consider. Mr Hackett points out: “With growing pendulum services from Asia via the Suez and Europe, the East Coast is indeed seeing increasing ship sizes.” Further, West Coast’s land issues meant that major retailers such as Walmart and IKEA dropped their large warehouse facilities into the vicinity of a number of East and Gulf Coast ports.

Despite this there are wide variations as to how far the East Coast ports have come along the green pathway. Virginia has already pushed down air emissions by around 86% with items like eco-friendly locomotives and tugs; Charleston on the other hand is aiming to get there in the next couple of years.

All this is germane to Panama-related plans because, as John Crowley of APMT’s Virginia facility explains: “Though the lines will primarily look at access and low cost, they are also looking at getting in and out, plus cargo turnaround times. This means big projects: high profile efforts like these must address community environmental concerns to be acceptable.”

As Savannah, for example, has found out. Environmentalists have been joined by legislators in challenging the dredging of 38 miles of river and seabed and while Atlanta’s Mayor, Kasim Reed points out the $652m deepening project is critical to the region’s economic development, the mitigation strategies and licences are presently under scrutiny.

So environmental initiatives aren’t about some notional ‘green’ figure; they are solidly about recognising the community’s link with the port and getting cooperation going. “You need the community’s support for major works,” reiterates Mr Crowley.

It’s a path the West Coast ports have already trodden. Chris Cannon of the Port of Los Angeles says that although LA is now one of the stars of environmental stewardship, the experience has been hard won. “While there’s no way we’d presume to tell any other port what to do, we do know what happened to us. We got sued,” he says, bluntly.

The stark lesson of a whole operation being pulled up and forced to look very carefully at its impact on an incensed community was deeply felt: “Getting ahead of the curve, voluntarily putting in place mitigation measures and opening ourselves up to consultation and real transparency has been part of our strategy since then,” he says.

Although he says that LA had “some of the worst air pollution in the states” he believes the principle is the same, and waiting for a tipping point could leave it too late. “We found we had to start reaching out to any community or environmental groups early on, actively going out to engage with them rather than waiting for them to come in angry,” he says.