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Technological advances and changing climatic conditions have ushered in a new era of "Silk Road on Ice" (SRI). However, the growing popularity of SRI and the isolated, pristine environment of the polar ice regions have exacerbated the risks for conventional ice shipping. As shipping risk, especially in the Arctic ice region, involves environmental, economic, technological and managerial aspects, most existing risk assessments and methodologies do not incorporate specific Arctic risk factors to estimate shipping risk from a systemic perspective. This paper proposes a System Dynamics (SD) model to simultaneously incorporate these combined factors into the risk assessment of ice-area shipping, focusing on elucidating the factors shaping the risk of ice-area shipping and the various interlinked responses and feedbacks among the factors. The results show that the proposed risk assessment tool for shipping in icy regions can provide decision-making for advance planning of voyages and thus further improve the reliability of shipping route planning through ice.
Niu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.