How risk management fails to protect maritime supply chains through climate change risk impacts: A literature critique

Prospects for the global quality and future of global supply chains, shipping and seaports have never seemed so uncertain. These face significant commercial challenges to facilitate trade, ensure profit maximisation, cost recovery, environmental sustainability and securitisation against increasing disruption risks throughout all stages from producer to consumer. Significant legal, environmental, commercial, political, social and physical risks all threaten the quality of maritime trade’s existing quality and other key stakeholder requirements. Whilst existing supply chain stakeholders, journals and methods have prioritised disruptions, from strikes, inventory disruptions, port congestion, financial crises, terrorism to accidents, this conceptual paper’s research contribution in a critical literature review establishes the failure of conventional risk management theory, methods and standards to protect maritime supply chains, especially current research journals’ failure to guide policy stakeholders and academics, to prioritise increasingly uncertain disruption risks associated with climate change. Its originality and value proposes revisions to risk management theory, as the first paper to specifically consider defining an entire maritime supply chain’s conceptual framework, its nature and characteristics. Its findings identify existing climate change disruption risks and impact costs, conceptualising adaptation strategies across maritime supply chain systematically, from a stakeholder requirement perspective, rather than isolated adaptation efforts for individual stakeholders and stages in current literature. Findings establish risk management fails to protect supply chains sufficiently from climate change uncertainty in not appearing as a risk concern/priority in established journals with limited stakeholder awareness, no consistent definition, method, equations, strategies in existing methods and no existing case studies with empirical probabilities of climate change risks occurring or calculated impact costs to assist stakeholders and researchers. It identifies how existing risk management methods not only ignore and underestimate these risks/impacts but fail to protect maritime supply chains and stakeholders, especially developing nations incurring significant geographical, resources and other constraints to effective, conventional risk management. These findings aim to reduce maladaptation costs through proposing an integrated risk-vulnerability, impact cost analysis method and theory through means of a physical Pacific, maritime supply chain case study to direct future research. This aims to overcome current risk management theory failure to prioritise a significant emerging risk to the future of maritime supply chains