# Sustainability Challenges in Maritime Transport and Logistics Industry and Its Way Ahead
## 1 Introduction
Therefore, sustainability across all three dimensions, i.e., economic, environmental and social, is imperative to minimize economic and social costs, to reduce environmental impacts caused by such ship operations, and to improve residents' health. Out of the three dimensions of sustainability, the social dimension is becoming a major point of policy focus because some ports'/cities' interfaces have been affected by ships' exhausts. SOx, NOx, and PMs and the other ship emissions from port-related activities are said to cause lung cancer and heart-related diseases. Cruise ships are more to blame for emitting the above gases than cargo ships because the former are normally berthed nearer city centers. Like all major port cities in Europe, people living in Asian port cities, among others, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore are more exposed to highly polluted air due to the fastest growing cruise industry in the world. NABU estimates the amount of pollution caused by cruise ships in large German ports and concludes that \"heavy fuel oil can contain 3500 times more sulphur than diesel that is used for land traffic vehicles\" [21]. In dealing with the three dimensions of sustainability, we need to consider externalities arising from gas emission. [PERSON] [22] attempted to analyze ship gas emission in association with externalities. Despite the fact that the IMO has been implementing green shipping and port initiatives to reduce GHG from ships and port activities, it seems that sustainability in the maritime transport and logistics requires proactive measures referring to land transport and aviation sectors. In the existing literature, three notable special issues have tried to deal with sustainability in shipping and ports [23; 24; 25]. The Special Issue of _Transportation Research Part D_ edited by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [23] focused on the following issues: The comparison of three options complying with ECA sulphur and NOX tier III regulation; costs and benefits analysis of sulphur reduction measures; discussion on energy replacement with liquefied natural gas (LNG) in ECAs; discussion on the limitations of the financial assessment of technologies assisting compliance with the sulphur regulations of MARPOL Annex VI; the future low-sulphur fuel requirements in Sulphur Emission Control Areas (SECA); case studies of SECA application to the North and Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea; and estimation of emissions of noxious gases from vessel operations in a potential ECA in the Port of Incheon. Another Special Issue--_Transportation Research Part E_ edited by [PERSON] et al. [24]--covered the following topics: decision support to improving sustainability in maritime shipping; sustainability ranking of the UK major ports by an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method; application of scenario technique to assess total CO2 emissions and costs of UK import trade re-routing containers; slow steaming sustainability initiatives to explore optimal speed decisions; a sustainable maritime supply chain design by Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) from the viewpoint of customer requirements; and a proposal of environmental governance mechanisms to enhance shipping firms' environmental performance. The other Special Issue, under the title _Transportation Research Part D_ edited by [PERSON] et al.