Outside In | Can Asia lead a green revolution in the world’s cruise industry?

There is something about boats, deep in the subconscious, that seems to stretch back to my landlocked childhood. You see it in the obsession with the Titanic that has played out this week in the frantic hunt for the Titan submersible. You see it in the kayakers who traverse the Sai Kung coastline every weekend. You see it in China’s pride in the recent launch of its first super-luxury cruise ship, the 5,246-passenger Adora Magic City.

Boats have a particularly special place here in Hong Kong. There was something uniquely exotic about commuting on the Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui to my office in Central daily. Even more so was finishing a day of meetings in Guangzhou by clambering onto the Pearl River overnight ferry down to Hong Kong. Sitting on its top deck under fairy lights, with a Tsingtao beer in hand and the banks of the river sweeping by in silent darkness, remains among my warmest memories.

But as ocean-plying container ships and increasingly colossal cruise ships appear in larger numbers, my fondness for boats has become an increasingly guilty pleasure. There was something surreal about watching the 400-metre-long Ever Given container ship blocking the Suez Canal for a week in March 2021, almost identical in size to the International Finance Centre in Central lying on its side.

Further back, the massive 13-deck MSC Opera ploughed into the Venice dockside in 2019. Whether it is Venice, Barcelona, Miami, Sydney or Skagway in Alaska, these ships are bloating out of all proportion to the docksides they dominate, looming over the port cities they visit. Once called floating hotels, they are now more like floating cities. The newest ships – Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas, at 362 metres long and able to carry about 7,000 guests and more than 2,000 crew – have created ecosystems that threaten everything they touch.

Most are fuelled by sulphur-heavy oil, leaving port cities heavily polluted. The European lobby group Transport & Environment recently reported that the 218 cruise ships active in Europe in 2022 pumped into the air more than four times the sulphuric oxide emitted by all of Europe’s cars.