A structured review of green shipping research (1987-2016)

Over the past 30 years, there have been growing concerns on the environmental impacts from shipping, which has attracted great attention from both academia and practitioners. Understanding developments of this topic can help them to know the previous studies and further to guide the future research directions for researchers. To achieve this research purpose, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of green shipping research, comprising 165 papers published in transportation journals in SSCI of 2016 over the period 1987-2016. The evolution patterns of researchers, journals, affiliations, research methods, the major issues, causes, and changes are involved. We find that the research of green shipping has increased greatly since 2012, accounting for 71.5% of the reviewed papers, and European institutions still have a leading position in this area, Asian researchers are catching up by the average growth rate of 4.95 times per five year and are gaining importance in this research area. The main focus of research on green shipping paid more attention on air pollutions especially to greenhouse gases emissions. Moreover, the classification of measures of green shipping practices (GSPs) like technical measures, operational options, market-based measures and recycling and reusing is becoming clear. However, the existing studies about sea pollutions are immaturity, lacking diverse solutions and relative mature pollution evaluation system. On the other hand, researchers from different countries seldom cooperated with each other to give effective suggestions on setting standards and laws of green shipping, and executing policies from IMO. Therefore, future research on green shipping is not only to strengthen technology researches to take effective measures to calculate and reduce emissions including sea and air pollutions comprehensively but also to enhance international cooperation to study how to carry out international standards and policies effectively.