1 INTRODUCTION

Despite the indisputable role of shipping in ensuring

the continuity and efficiency of goods supplies, some

unexpected events, lately often, occur that undermine

the stability of maritime supply chains and cause

significant disruptions in international trade [27].

These kinds of surprising events are sometimes

referred to as the black swans. Although they may

come with different names (e.g. grey swans, perfect

storm, dragon-king, etc.), [14, 35] of slightly different

meanings [13, 14, 18], all of them are related to rare,

largely unpredictable, and extreme events bearing

significant consequences. Such events observed in

recent years include among others:

1. The global COVID-19 pandemic [24, 37, 54];

2. The almost one-week Suez Canal blockage in 2021

[12];

3. Severe drought in South America affecting

navigation in the Amazon river system and Panama

Canal;

4. Russian invasion of Ukraine resulting (apart from

tragic consequences) in sanctions imposed on the

former's economy [7] as well as the lockdown on

grain export across the Black Sea impacting the

global food market [9];

5. Hazards to Red Sea navigation related to the

activities of Houthi rebels in Yemen [38, 52].

All of the above came as a surprise to the global

maritime community not only because of their

unexpected occurrence but also far-reaching

consequences. Although it can be argued whether the

manifestation of black swans could be predicted [14], it

is strategies to handle them that attract more attention

in the present dynamic world [3]. The question is not

how can one expect the unexpected but how to prepare

for the unexpected.

There are numerous studies in the literature

touching upon the vulnerability and resilience of

supply chains [32] or transportation systems [17, 43,

55], including maritime ones [15]. For instance, sources

A Seaports' Perspective on Resilience and Preparedness

for Challenges of the Evolving World

P. Wolska & J. Nasur

Gdynia Maritime University, Gdynia, Poland

ABSTRACT: Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed intrinsic vulnerabilities embedded within

the globalized system of maritime transportation and the economy as a whole. To counteract similar disruptions

in the future, certain actions must be undertaken by industry players, such as maritime administrations, shippers,

and seaports. The current study is focused on the latter. It utilizes an expert elicitation through Computer Assisted

Web Interview (CAWI) intending to identify how aware the seaport administrators and managers are of the

dangers of today’s globalized economy and how they intend to counteract these. Herein study focuses on the

perspective of worldwide seaports' representatives by taking into account a wide set of potential challenges. The

considered threats are not only limited to environment-related ones but also include safety and security matters

as well as the introduction of disruptive technologies utilized in the maritime transportation of the new era.

http://www.transnav.eu

the International Journal

on Marine Navigation

and Safety of Sea Transportation

Volume 20

Number 1

March 2026

DOI: 10.12716/1001.20.01.08

of supply chain risks, their potential consequences [20],

and strategies for handling them have been

investigated [26, 40] with focus primarily on expectable

disruptions, such as natural events like climate changes

[8, 44] or technical/human errors. Many sources focus

on the overall improvement of maritime supply chains

[10, 30, 41] or specifically on port resilience [20].

Notable examples of the latter focused on the ideas of

a port coalition [2, 46] or co-opetition [2]. Additionally,

disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic

allowed for studying the performance of supply chains

[45] and the feasibility of a just-in-case approach [19],

as well as different aspects of supply chain resilience

[16, 29, 31, 36, 39, 51]. Moreover [31], argues that “port

resilience” is a relatively new term that is still under-

investigated with previous research being directed

mainly towards climate change, omitting other threats

to ports' operations.

However, despite a variety of research focused on

the resilience of a maritime transportation network

[24], to the authors' best knowledge, these have largely

been conducted without considering the viewpoints of

the main stakeholders of this network - seaports. There

are some notable exceptions, but these were

significantly limited in scope due to a narrowed set of

considered threats and challenges (mostly

environment-related only, i.e. climate changes,

weather conditions, or natural disasters) [25, 34] as well

as geographically [4, 5] (by consideration of a case

study seaport with all its local specificity).

Therefore, to bridge this gap, this study addresses

the following research questions:

− RQ1 - What are the biggest threats and challenges

for the seaports in the evolving world?

− RQ2 - How do representatives of seaports assess

their resilience to particular threats?

− RQ3 - What kind of countermeasures are taken by

the seaports to face the incoming changes?

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:

Section 2 introduces the method applied and describes

details of the experts' elicitation. Section 3 presents the

results of the study and analyzes the main insights.

Section 4 discusses findings and limitations as well as

outlines future work in this field. Section 5 concludes

the paper.

2 METHODS AND MATERIALS

Opinions of seaport representatives have been

obtained using Computer-Assisted Web Interview

(CAWI). It has been chosen over other methods of

expert elicitation (like direct in-person interviews) as it

allows for study expansion through sending a

questionnaire around the world. A similar approach

has previously been used for global seaport research

[47]. Moreover, this form allowed respondents to

remain anonymous during the survey, reducing their

bias and increasing the sincerity of their answers. The

questionnaire was designed using a widely available

online survey platform and consisted of 11-12

questions split into subsections. The number of

questions varied depending on the answers (positive

or negative) provided to one of the questions revealing

two possible paths to finish the survey. All the

questions together with all the additional information

contained in the survey were provided in English.

The first section contained questions necessary for

statistical analysis of the respondents’ profiles. The

survey was completely anonymous with respect to the

personal data of a particular respondent (port

representative) but asked for the organizational

department and the country where the port is located

as well as the latter’s name – to allow for data analysis.

The second section consisted of just one question:

“Is the term Port Resilience familiar to you?”. The

affirmative answer led to an additional subsection, in

which the respondents were asked to choose from

provided “resilience” definitions that would in their

opinion be the best suited in the context of a seaport or

they could enter their own. Whereas the negative

answer to the main question resulted in skipping that

part so that nobody was required to choose a definition

of the term that they were unfamiliar with. The

definitions to select from were picked by the authors

from among various ones found in available sources on

the merits of differing from others enough to be able to

distinguish them as separate:

− “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to

misfortune or change” [33];

− “the quality of being able to return quickly to a

previous good condition after problems” [6];

− “the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly

or easily from, or resist being affected by,

misfortune, shock, illness, etc.” [42];

− “the system’s ability to transit from non-normal

operations to normal operation.” [21];

− “indicator of evaluating the intensity or ability of a

system to respond to disruptions or disasters” [53].

Additionally, there was a possibility to enter the

own definition that was not listed.

The final section (same for all the participants)

started with the “port resilience” definition that was

assumed to be leading in this study. Herein, so as in the

survey, “port resilience” is understood as defined by

UNCTAD: “It is the ability to maintain an acceptable

level of service in the face of disruptions (e.g.

pandemics, natural disasters, and cyber or terrorist

attacks); this varies with port size, location and type of

operations” [49]. This was done to enable all the

participants (whether they knew the term beforehand

or not) to carry on with completing the rest of the

survey. Moreover, it allowed for an exclusion of the

possibility that the differences in the responses in that

section arose due to various understandings of the

term, which, in turn, increased the consistency of the

results. Eventually, questions were asked (in line with

RQs raised in Introduction) to the effect of:

1. The most difficult challenges to maritime

transportation in terms of overcoming them;

2. Level of preparation for particular challenges (in the

port of employment as well as in other ports);

3. The most effective countermeasures that the port

can undertake.

To send out the survey, contact information for

worldwide seaports was collected via Internet search.

Invitations were first sent in August and September

2023, and then the process was repeated from

November 2023 to May 2024. Eventually, invitations to

participate in the study have been sent to 422 seaports

and terminals around the globe. Eventually, 48 replies

have been received (response rate: 11.4%).

Most of the collected questionnaires came from

European ports (38 out of 48). Apart from that, five

replies were received from ports located in North

America, three from Asia, and two from Oceania. In

total, results were obtained from ports located in

twenty-two different countries, see Figure 1.

Figure 1. Geographical breakdown of questionnaires

received

3 RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

At the beginning of the following section, general

information about the representatives of the seaports

involved in the study is introduced, to allow the basic

demographic breakdown of the participants.

Afterward, the section presents and analyzes the

survey’s results.

3.1 Port resilience and its definitions

Figure 2 depicts respondents’ familiarity with the term

“port resilience” along with their breakdown into

organizational departments in which they declared to

work. Before the study, some 23% of respondents (11

out of 48) were not familiar with the term “port

resilience”. As can be noted, “Marketing”, “General

Management” and “Operations” were strongly

represented in comparison to other departments.

However, even within departments dealing with

seaport resilience daily (like “General Management”

and “Operations”), there were some participants who

declared that they were not familiar with the term.

Among those respondents who declared

knowledge of the term “port resilience” (37 out of 48),

there was one definition that respondents favored the

most (46%), i.e.: “the quality or fact of being able to

recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected

by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.” [42]. The second

most popular answer: “an ability to recover from or

adjust easily to misfortune or change” [33] had 10 out

of 37 votes (27%). Noteworthy, each of the definitions

provided has been selected by at least one person,

which may reflect how a single term can be defined

differently in one industry. Moreover, only one

participant chose to enter their own definition, namely:

“the system's ability to adapt and respond to changing

environmental and social conditions”.

Figure 2. Breakdown of the respondents with respect to their

department and familiarity with the “port resilience” term

3.2 Challenges to the resilience of maritime transportation

Figure 3 illustrates how respondents judged challenges

to maritime transportation in terms of being difficult

for the port to overcome (RQ1). The form of this

question was a ranking (rank ordering) so the results

shown do not indicate how problematic the challenges

seem on any absolute or subjective scale but rather in

relation to one another. As presented on the diagram,

“natural disasters” and “wars/political conflicts” are

overall considered as the most serious issues whereas

“autonomization” together with “automatization” are

on the other side of the spectrum.

Figure 3. The respondents’ perception of the significance of

challenges to the maritime transportation

A total of 15 participants chose to state some other

challenges in addition to pre-defined ones. Economy-

related issues were mentioned multiple times:

“shipping costs”, “imbalance between supply and

demand”, “economic challenges”, and “Brexit”. Other

suggestions included “weather conditions, sea level”,

“winter conditions, availability of icebreakers”. If the

answers are compared with the respondents’ country

of origin, it becomes apparent that a lot of participants

focused on their local struggles. For instance,

“earthquake” was mentioned by a respondent from

New Zealand (where this kind of natural disaster

regularly occurs) [1, 48]. Similarly, a response

mentioning the icebreakers came from Finland, where

winter navigation is of utmost importance [50]. These

answers focusing on local problems show that even

though some of the challenges concern all the ports

globally, a local approach to resilience should not be

overlooked. Moreover, a seaport resilience that is

properly tailored for the specific needs of each port

should be eventually applied to reflect slightly

different requirements arising from e.g. geographical

specificity as that calls for distinct solutions.

3.3 Level of ports’ preparation

Further questions established how the ports viewed

preparedness for challenges of both the ports of their

employment and in general (RQ2). Breakdown of

responses is depicted in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Perceived level of preparation of own – “A)” and

other – “B)” ports for specific challenges

It may be observed that a lot of representatives

chose neutral answers to describe the preparedness of

other ports. This may be caused by participants’ lack of

knowledge in this matter or not having an opinion -

especially if taken into consideration together with the

results from one of the previous questions described in

this Section where 24 out of 48 participants chose the

“don’t know” option when asked whether other ports

were taking into account “port resilience”.

When analyzed in more detail, some of the results

lead to interesting conclusions. For instance, “global

lockdowns” have been rated surprisingly high. Not so

long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic proved that

lockdowns may cause a serious struggle for maritime

transportation. Meanwhile, the level of ports’

preparedness has been judged fairly well in this

matteras if their representatives had become

(over)confident that they could handle similar

situations sufficiently well in the future. Placed against

them being ranked as relatively difficult to overcome

(Figure 3) that assuredness may cause some doubts.

Strategies adapted as an aftermath of the COVID-19

pandemic had not had a chance to be tested in reality.

As a result one might wonder if they can truly be

classified as effective and could be relied upon if the

situation were to repeat itself.

At the same time, results indicate that the ports are

in general not ready to face “wars/political conflicts”.

Nevertheless, among the answers received there were

some “fully prepared” ones, and though it is hard to

imagine that this is the case, it might be that they were

restricted by a 5-point scale and meant “very well

prepared”. It must be noted, however, that these

results (as others presented in this Section) show a

perceived resilience of seaports, not an actual one.

Then, a comparison was made between two

environmental threats: sudden “natural disasters” and

more gradual “climate changes”. To this end, the

opinions of representatives of particular organizational

departments were analyzed. As can be seen in Figure

5, those working with day-to-day “Operations” were

most concerned with events happening at a moment’s

notice. On the contrary, “General management”

seemed to be thinking in more strategic terms,

addressing ever-progressing, large-scale processes of

climate change.

Figure 5. Level of preparation for “natural disasters” (left)

and “long-term climate changes” (right) declared by

representatives of particular departments

Figure 6 illustrates how the port representatives

judged the preparedness of the ports of their

employment (top) and their co-opetitors (bottom) for

“natural disasters” and “autonomization”.

Figure 6. Perceived level of preparation of own - “A” and

other - “B” ports for “natural disasters” - “1” and

“autonomization” - “2” in detail

The figures have been prepared in such a way as to

show a cross-section of all the answers given, broken

down into specific categories (successive rows of the

bar chart) with a breakdown of the responses into

percentage share and their total number. For instance,

looking at Figure 6 (A1 - preparation for natural

disasters in the port of employment) one can note that

among 48 responses gathered, five originated from

North America. Among these respondents, four

answered that their ports are fairly prepared for this

kind of challenge, and one that the port is fully

unprepared. The following category, i.e.

"Countermeasures" refers to the most effective

methods to respond to challenges of the world (in

general), according to the respondents' opinion. This

breakdown again applies to all (48) responses, but

bearing in mind the previous category, one can observe

some cross-sectional relations. For instance, the port

representatives who answered that their ports are fully

unprepared for natural disasters in their own port

selected creating long-term development plans as the

most effective countermeasure for all possible

challenges that the port can face - one of them was from

North America while the others from Europe.

Those two challenges were chosen for this more in-

depth analysis due to their positioning on opposite

sides of the spectrum of perceived difficulty in

overcoming (as given in Figure 3). The position of both

is not surprising - on one side there are “natural

disasters” and it is apparent that tsunamis,

earthquakes, and hurricanes remain a challenge

difficult to avoid or overcome by a seaport. On the

other, “autonomization” - though it certainly is a great

challenge for ports and will require a whole set of

adjustments, it is in general a disruption that is meant

to be an asset to maritime transportation and improve

the port's operations. Though it is not so much of a

safety-related issue (like natural disasters) one might

wonder whether the ports are taking this issue

seriously enough. Even though it does not bring the

kind of threats as wars or disasters, it certainly poses a

potentially disruptive change to the current

operational model of seaports [11]. As was recently

found, there is a set of challenges that still need to be

addressed and certain solutions must be developed

before the transition to autonomy becomes possible

[22].

Meanwhile, respondents appear to be pessimistic

about the preparedness of their ports for

“autonomization” (Figure 6, right-hand part). In

general, they evaluated that other ports are better

prepared for this challenge. Whether this is an effect of

technological propaganda of other market actors seen

through the lenses of knowledge of own position is one

of the potential explanations. This general effect is not

as apparent for the “natural disasters” (left-hand side

of Figure 6).

Lastly, the preferred countermeasures can be

examined. Two participants who selected

“implementing new technologies” as the most effective

method assessed their ports to be “fully prepared” for

“autonomization”. It is understandable that if they are

more focused on technologies, then they would find

themselves better adjusted to autonomy than ports

which are more directed towards e.g. “preparing

contingency plans”. Generally, the preparation of

plans, no matter whether contingency ones or those

focusing on long-term development, did not appear to

guarantee a sense of security. Although most of the

participants agreed on the significance of preparing

plans, it could not be determined whether their ports

did in fact prepare such documents. On top of this, it

could not in fact be verified whether such plans were

effective, as this can only be assessed (1) in hindsight

and (2) against a control group/entity.

3.4 Countermeasures

Participants were also asked whether “port resilience”

was taken into account in activities or plans for

development both in the port of their employment and

in ports in general. The former question was answered

affirmatively by most of the respondents (42 i.e. 88%)

seven of whom had previously self-declared as not

familiar with the term. In the latter question concerning

other ports, there was an extra option available of

“don’t know” to indicate that some of the

representatives may not know other ports' plans

accurately. Noteworthy, half of the participants chose

that option. Except for one “no”, the votes split almost

evenly between “yes” and “don’t know”. This

distribution of responses may suggest that port

employees are not always fully aware of potential

competitors and what trends concerning safety issues

and ensuring continuous operational capability prevail

at institutions with similar business profiles.

Next, the survey touched upon possible

countermeasures against the aforementioned

challenges that can be undertaken by the port (RQ3,

breakdown of responses is depicted in Figure 7).

Respondents had the option of selecting the most

effective ones in their opinion. The long-term

development plans turned out to be the most popular

with 19 votes, while the “other” option was used only

once to state “all of the above”.

Figure 7. Breakdown of answers to the perception of the most

effective countermeasures against the challenges of the

evolving world

4 DISCUSSION

The following Section discusses the significance of

findings derived based on the results presented. In the

further parts, the limitations of the study and the

method applied are described along with their

potential impact on the results gathered. Lastly, future

works on the topic of port resilience are outlined.

4.1 Findings

As mentioned at the beginning of Section 3.4, ports’

representatives self-declared as including the

challenges of the modern world in the development of

their respective organizations so as to maintain their

resilience. It is especially visible if one considers that

seven of them were not even familiar with the term in

the first place. It shows that not knowing the term or its

exact definition is not equivalent to not applying its

principles in business. However, the fact that the port

representatives were not so sure about how that issue

is approached by their direct competitors may indicate

that these responses represent some level of

overstatement. It may be that the ports do in fact

include the challenges in their development plans, but

the details of such actions are not fully known to

persons who did fill out the questionnaire. With this in

mind, respondents of the herein study are to a certain

degree aware of the inclusion of “port resilience” and

related issues in the development plans of their own

organizations, but at the same time do not fully

apprehend actions taken by their counterparts from

other ports.

Nevertheless, most of the respondents declared that

changes in the natural environment (either abrupt or

gradual) and security concerns affect their ports’

resilience the most, which answered RQ1. It could be

argued whether all ports are equally affected by

potential natural disasters (for instance, some of them

are not located in seismic activity zones) and whether

the high position of security-related issues is not a

manifestation of an availability bias. All in all, natural

disasters and security incidents may happen anywhere

in the world with some possibility and lead to

potentially devastating consequences. Interestingly, a

relatively high position of “global lockdowns” reflects

how the actual occurrence of a black swan changes the

perspectives of decision-makers and those responsible

for contingency planning. It may be raised that even

though there are natural disasters, security incidents,

effects of climate change, etc. reported daily

somewhere in the shipping industry, global lockdown

was an unprecedented event that few if anyone had a

chance of experiencing beforehand or an ability to

predict. With its eventual occurrence, it is now rated

highly among the potential challenges and even

suggested as one in the very definition of resilience as

provided in [49] an example of availability bias.

It is of note that “autonomization” and

“automatization” were deemed rather irrelevant

(Figure 3) in the time when discoveries in Artificial

Intelligence make it to the headlines almost on a daily

basis. Perhaps those within the port industry are not

concerned about the impact of new technologies on

their business because they know better how

challenging it would be to implement them [23].

Another explanation could be that the perceived

significance of challenges listed in the questionnaire on

the resilience of ports is somewhat inversely

proportional to the degree to which the industry can

influence given phenomena or prepare for it (which

also answers RQ2). Those outside of industry impact:

“natural disasters”, “wars”, “terrorism” etc. are among

the most relevant. “Autonomization”,

“automatization”, “personnel shortage”, and “new

regulations” are concepts that can be affected by

business stakeholders, one way or another. If that line

of thought is correct, then the port representatives may

perceive these challenges as manageable and

predictable, or at least foreseeable. If an event is

perceived as reasonably foreseeable, one does not need

to prepare for it, because one would expect to see early

signs of it approaching. With warnings ahead, one can

develop impromptu means of evading the challenge:

stalling it through lobbying (“new regulations”,

“automatization”) or even using one trend against

another (“automatization” against “personnel

shortage”), depending on circumstances. Moreover, if

a challenge occurrence can be foreseen, it is unlikely to

happen suddenly. From an individual point of view of

a particular person who happens to work as a port

representative, it may as well occur after the port and

the representative part ways. Why worry, then?

Nevertheless, even if the possibility of a disastrous

event is overestimated, its mere existence calls for the

development of appropriate mitigation plans. For

answering RQ3, these plans have been declared as the

most popular way of addressing the challenges faced,

either in the short- or long-term. This was followed by

creating infrastructure and facilities, which can also be

regarded as a form of long-term planning. The three

options combined constitute 85% of the answers, see

Figure 7. What is interesting is that all four responses

received from the ports located in the United States

were in favor of either long-term planning or creating

infrastructure and facilities. This stands to the contrary

to what was found by [4] in their case study of two

American ports. Their results indicated that the

stakeholders seemed to prefer disaster response to

long-term planning. One might wonder whether the

causes for this discrepancy are local or if there was a

shift in the ports approach to the topic of resilience in

the last couple of years. It is of note that only two ports

declared that they do aim at implementing new

technologies in their future development. This may

indicate the passive approach to technological

development where ports as organizations see

themselves more as customers and users of

technologies developed rather than their active

stakeholders, potentially in close cooperation with

actual developers of innovative technologies.

Noteworthy, this (arguably passive) approach puts

seaports in a position where technological

developments and possibilities brought by it may not

necessarily be properly included in the long-term

development plans, thus making them obsolete from

the very beginning. The reasons for such a passive

attitude are yet to be determined.

4.2 Limitations

Limitations of the study described herein can be listed

as follows:

− Despite the authors’ best efforts, the number of

responses to the survey could by no means be

classified as satisfactory. Because of this, the results

would probably be more accurate had more of the

ports chosen to participate. As is usually the case

with any sort of statistical analysis bigger samples

tend to give more reliable results. One of the causes

of this is that online surveys are usually

characterized by lower response rates than in-

person interviews. This issue impacts also

geographical diversity, thus somehow biased

answers because participants were mostly

European.

− Some of the questions were asked for the opinions

of the port representatives. Those opinions could

have been subjective. Thus, like in every expert

elicitation, some of the answers concerning ports’

preparedness to face challenges could be slightly

overstated or understated.

− Additionally, respondents came from different

departments, some of which had more to do with

the topic of the survey than others. It probably

could be presumed that someone from the

infrastructure department would in general be

better suited to answer this particular survey than

someone from the marketing department, though it

might not always be the case. It is also of note that

in some cases the respondents provided their own

names of occupational positions. In such cases,

subjective grouping was made by the authors to

aggregate and unify the names, which may cause

some discrepancies.

− Last but not least, some of the questions, especially

the security-related ones, concerned very sensitive

information that some ports could be apprehensive

to share.

4.3 Future work

Future work on the topic of seaport resilience will be

oriented toward reviewing the ways that ports have

used to prepare for some of the threats mentioned in

this study. In particular, disruptive technologies and

the autonomization of maritime transportation are of

interest. This is especially important since some of the

respondents believe their ports are fairly (or even fully)

prepared to accommodate autonomous vessels, which

is somewhat in contradiction to the conclusions of a

recently published study on the ports' adaptation to

handle autonomous ships [22]. Therefore, the results of

the research presented herein will be used as a starting

point for further investigation of seaports’

countermeasures in relation to a specific threat.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Port resilience remains an under-investigated topic,

especially given the extensive set of challenges faced by

the global shipping industry and the far-reaching

consequences of not being resilient to them. The

current study applied web-based interviews to elicit

the opinions of ports’ representatives on what these

challenges are and how to best prepare for their

emergence, thus increasing resilience to them.

The results indicate that challenges external to the

maritime industry are seen as the most significant and

likely to materialize. Among them are those related to

natural phenomena and security. More internal factors

such as accidents, political impact, or manifestations of

Industry 4.0 are of less concern, possibly because ports’

representatives consider them controllable, at least to

some extent. With this in mind, the level of

preparedness declared by questioned ports’

representatives did not show a similar dependency.

Herein, the results were more diversified. On top of

this, the respondents showed a higher level of

optimism concerning their ports’ preparedness (and by

that - resilience) than when asked about their

coopetitors. This may be the effect of either

(over)confidence or lack of knowledge on the actions

taken by other organizations to tackle similar

challenges. Since the occurrences of such challenges

may lead to colossal losses, it would be beneficial for a

global port community to promote knowledge-sharing

on actions taken to improve resilience within ports for

the benefit of themselves as well as the entire shipping

industry and global economy. Despite most of the

ports include resilience to modern-day challenges in

their strategic plans, the unexpected nature of events

potentially undermining it calls for questioning the

adequacy of such an approach. “War Office is always

preparing for the last war” and so the ports’ resilience

management plans alone may be insufficient to tackle

emergent challenges.

Reaching the above conclusion, we believe to have

answered the Research Questions stated in the

Introduction. The results can be found impactful not

only by scholars active in modeling the resilience of

global shipping networks but also by the global port

community itself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Authors express their gratitude to Dr. Mateusz Gil and Dr.

Krzysztof Wróbel of Gdynia Maritime University for their

assistance in designing, conducting, and reporting the herein

study. The authors are grateful to all participants of the study

for sharing their knowledge.

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