Social impact assessment for alternative maritime fuel systems for a sustainable design
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Date
2026-10-15
Authors
Γιαννακοπούλου, Λαμπρινή-Αγγελική
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Abstract
During last years, sustainability has gained rising interest among industries, in an effort to align human activities with United Nations Sustainability Development Goals and ensure that future generations will live in an environmentally safe planet, in societies with equal opportunities. Maritime is acknowledged as a significant participant in this endeavor, as its operations have impacts at global extent. Important steps have been made to guide shipping operations to more sustainable practices, however industry recognizes that these steps remain partial and are mostly identified as ecological sustainability improvement efforts. Driven by this conclusion, sustainability concept expansion attempts followed, leading to the conclusion that a sustainable system/operation is one that achieves an optimal tradeoff between performance, cost, environmental, circularity and social pillars, considering its impacts along its lifecycle. This expanded sustainability concept led to the realization that maritime social sustainability is usually overlooked, which in turn has caused questions around term’s definition and scope. Driven by this vagueness around social sustainability in maritime, this study sets a first goal and attempts a literature review, in order to investigate industry’s perception and understanding of social sustainability, shipping operations’ social impacts and Social Impact Assessment methods. Results reveal that subject is still at a premature level, with scarce efforts of maritime social sustainability approaches in literature, mostly carried out through stakeholder subjective beliefs and general terms, such as corporate social responsibility. Resulting gap of this literature review sets the second goal of this study, which is the proposition of a Social Impact Assessment framework that will ease consideration of Social Sustainability during maritime projects’ sustainability assessment. For this purpose, Social Impact Assessment of alternative marine fuels’ supply chains is attempted for hydrogen and ammonia, utilizing the novel ISO 14075:2024 framework, which is based on UNEP/SETAC guidelines. ANSYS Social impact Audit Tool (Part of Granta EduPack Software) is used in the analysis as a Social Hotspots Database and offers country level data for values of social indicators that represent social sustainability performance. With ANSYS data, investigation of social impacts of hydrogen and ammonia supply chains, on 5 stakeholder groups, those of Workers, Consumers, Local Community, Society and Value Chain is carried out, as well as an analysis of social hotspots per supply chain phase. A sensitivity analysis of results by review of social hotspots under different thresholds is also conducted and conclusions for social sustainability performance of hydrogen and ammonia supply chains are drawn.
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Keywords
Social sustainability, Fuel supply chain, Maritime, Alternative fuels, Social impact assessment