Economic and Social Cost of In-port Ships’ Emissions

A meaningful way to assign economic impact (i.e. monetary values) to air emissions from ships is the estimation of related external costs or externalities. An externality arises when the social or economic activities of one group of persons have an impact on another group and when that impact is not fully accounted, or compensated for, by the first group. Globally in 2006, SOx, NOx and PM emissions externalities, from global shipping, added up to 183 billion €, while for the Mediterranean region the corresponding total value was almost 11 billion €. Research efforts to present port related externalities have already been published but they are affected by the lack in sufficient and precise emissions data. This chapter contains a review of the methodological and empirical state of the art on the methodologies for the estimation of external costs due to ships’ emissions in ports.