TRUST: Towards Resilient and SUStainable ConTainer Supply Chains

Risk research represents an important challenge for the resilience and sustainability of container supply chains (CSCs). Its foci are being expanded from classical safety, through security to climate adaptation. Addressing such risks simultaneously requires integration across disciplines and research methodologies. The research community currently lacks a critical understanding of non-classical CSC risks arising from climate change, security threats (e.g. cyber-attacks), and emerging technologies (e.g. autonomous ships) in the digital industrial era. Through ground-breaking and interdisciplinary research, TRUST aims to address the key research question regarding which kinds of risk schemes can harness science and technology most effectively to achieve long-term resilient and sustainable CSC systems. The findings will shift the traditional risk management practice paradigm and deliver a novel programme that will enable the quantification, integration and communication of risk information from different areas and facilitate the movement of risk culture from a reactive single-dimensional scheme towards a proactive multi-dimensional regime. The programme divides into three integrated domains: 1) exploring and quantifying climate risks to rationalise adaptation planning; 2) forecasting security risks to address the most commanding threats in CSCs; and 3) advancing holistic safety approaches for CSCs involving new techniques and environments (e.g. Arctic shipping). The combination of objective (from historical accidents) and subjective (from stakeholders’ perceptions) risk data will inform the exploitation of the advances in new safety and security risk models to enhance climate risk and adaptation studies in a complementary way. The work will address the significant methodological issues associated with resilience and sustainability sciences and advance the state-of-the-art to a point where robust CSCs can be developed and realised, even under deep uncertainty.