Shipping: the shoreline of time and technology.

Shipping, like many other industries, is in the midst of a technological revolution, which shows little sign of coming to an end. Many of these changes have been beneficial. Increasing automation has enabled great cost savings to be made. Improved cargo-handling techniques have enabled turn-round times to be reduced from days to hours. Containerization has enabled ship, road and rail transport to be integrated more effectively. Ships have grown in size, enabling unit costs to be substantially reduced. Communications have been vastly improved, thanks to the use of space satellites, and it is now possible for a ship's position to be fixed to within a few metres. New designs have been produced, enabling speeds to be more than doubled - a great advantage on short-sea routes, for example, where speed is especially important.

But some of these innovations have drawbacks. The giant tankers that reached their peak of popularity in the 1970s (and are still in many cases in service today) carry vast amounts of oil; but when something goes wrong, they can cause pollution on an equally massive scale. The invention of radar helped to reduce the number of collisions, but also resulted in the new phenomenon of the radar-assisted collision. The roll-on/roll-off ship led to dramatic improvements in short-sea services, but the design features that are essential to its success have also led to major tragedies. It is now possible for a distress message to be sent automatically if something goes wrong, but up to 99 per cent of the distress messages sent by emergency position-indicating radio beacons turn out to be false, because of faults in design or operation. High-tensile steel was introduced in the early 1980s because it is stronger than conventional steel and enables the plates with which ships are constructed to be thinner (and cheaper), but it corrodes at the same rate. Serious concern is being expressed about the condition of some ships built of high-tensile steel.

Experience has shown that technology offers great benefits, but only if the safety and environmental implications are carefully assessed at the same time as the economic benefits.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, shipping enjoyed several years of boom, but it ended very suddenly, largely because of steep rises in the price of oil in the 1970s. This led to a decline in demand for oil and a massive oversupply of tankers that has lingered on until the present. Other sections of the...