Impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic on carbon emissions from international shipping

• Published in: Marine pollution bulletin 2023-04, Vol.189, p.114730-114730, Article 114730
• Main Authors: Xu, Lang, Yang, Zhihui, Chen, Jihong, Zou, Zeyuan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Carbon; Carbon emission; Communicable Disease Control; COVID-19; COVID-19 epidemic; COVID-19 infection; GARCH model; heteroskedasticity; Humans; industry; International shipping; marine pollution; quantitative analysis
• ISSN: 0025-326X; 1879-3363
• DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.114730

The COVID-19 epidemic made the most countries to take strict lockdown measures, what has seriously caused an unprecedented impact in the shipping industries, whereas these measures have also played a significant impact to control carbon emissions from international shipping. Here, we try to use the threshold generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity and the exponential generalized autoregressive heteroscedasticity to investigate whether the fluctuations of the control variable on carbon emissions from international shipping are asymmetric or not. On this basis, the GARCH-MIDAS model is introduced to discuss whether the newly confirmed cases are independent of control variables and have an impact on the fluctuation of carbon emissions. From the results, we find that the information contained in the newly confirmed cases cannot be covered when adding the other control variables. In addition, the newly confirmed cases have a negative impact on the volatility of carbon emissions, while the other control variables significantly increase carbon emissions. This study provides a quantitative research method for the analysis of the volatility and impact factors on international shipping carbon emissions, which helps to formulate more reasonable emission reduction measures and promote the low-carbon transformations of the global shipping industry. [Display omitted] •Explore the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on carbon emissions from international shipping•Build GARCH-MIDAS model by adding control variables about the COVID-19 epidemic•Analyze the effectiveness of the COVID-19 epidemic on the fluctuation of carbon emissions from international shipping•The COVID-19 epidemic has obviously reduced the fluctuation of carbon emissions from international shipping.