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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1552544
This article is part of the Research Topic Challenges and Opportunities for Decarbonizing the Maritime Industry View all 4 articles
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The maritime supply chain is undergoing a significant transformation as the industry converges on a consensus to promote low-carbon and sustainable development. In response, governments and international organizations have implemented and updated policies to establish greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets for the shipping industry. Achieving green and low-carbon sustainable development in the maritime supply chain necessitates coordinated decision-making among three primary entities: governments, shipping companies, and port enterprises. In this paper, a combination of system dynamics (SD) and evolutionary game theory is employed to examine the decision-making behaviors of these three parties and analyze their evolutionary pathways. Data on recent investments by typical enterprises and government subsidies have been collected, and an SD model is utilized to empirically verify the overall evolutionary process of the system and conduct a sensitivity analysis. Our findings indicate that the intensity and stability of government regulatory policies are pivotal in driving the low-carbon transformation of the maritime supply chain. Notably, a nonlinear relationship is observed between the severity of government policies and enterprise decisions. Furthermore, the level of collaboration between port and shipping enterprises in selecting technological pathways directly impacts the effectiveness of emission reductions. Additionally, the extent of low-carbon preference in market demand significantly influences the effectiveness of policies and the strategic choices made by enterprises.
Keywords: Maritime supply chain, ports and shipping companies, carbon emission governance, tripartite evolutionary game, Cooperative decision-making
Received: 28 Dec 2024; Accepted: 11 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhu, Zhou, Li and Zheng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Lequn Zhu, Tianjin Research Institute of Water Transport Engineering, Tianjin, China
Ran Zhou, Tianjin Research Institute of Water Transport Engineering, Tianjin, China
Xiaojun Li, Tianjin Research Institute of Water Transport Engineering, Tianjin, China
Lin Zheng, Tianjin Research Institute of Water Transport Engineering, Tianjin, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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