Transportation systems in the Arctic: A systematic literature review using textometry

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Abstract

Changes in the climatic conditions in the Arctic are opening new trading routes (Northern Sea Route & North West Passage) in this area. There is a growing importance of this theme in the conversation amongst transportation scholars. Indeed, the academic conversation about Arctic transportation is becoming a field of research in itself. The aim of this study is to look at this conversation and provide a state-of-the-art of Arctic transportation systems. The investigation is based on a systematic literature review of peer reviewed articles dealing with transportation and the Arctic. The corpus composed of 386 articles about Arctic transportation is studied from a textometric perspective and compared with professional press to identify gaps between concerns of professionals and scholars’ research. Results show a growing body of research with a strong node of experts. Their research covers operations and sustainable development of shipping and port activities along the Arctic routes. We also identify five major areas for further investigation: the tactical perspective and management approach of issues in the field, risk management in general, logistic systems to access to the Arctic routes, major clustering projects development in the area and management of specific fleets required by the extreme conditions.

Introduction

One of global warming’s effects is the melting of ice caps in Polar areas and especially in the Arctic region. The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, rapidly increasing glacier and sea ice melt (Quinn, 2008). This ice melt makes shipping possible for a certain period in the year along the coasts of Russia, with the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Canada with the North West Passage (NWP) (Lasserre and Faury, 2019). Moreover, the ice melt influences the commercial viability of these routes (Bekkers et al., 2018). Potential profitability comes from a reduction in distance for transcontinental shipping, and especially the Asia-Europe shipping (Lasserre, 2014).

The ice melt has two main consequences for transportation. First, it opens a passage for vessels crossing in the Northern American area (Chénier et al., 2017) and in the Eurasian area (Solvang et al., 2018). These routes may not only be cheaper and faster solutions for transcontinental transportation, but they could also become less-polluting routes overall (Theocharis et al., 2018, Zhang et al., 2019). Second, this melt also enables easier exploitation and transportation of resources to and from the Arctic area. It is especially true considering oil fields (Remishevskaia et al., 2018) and liquefied natural gas fields (Ritz, 2019).

During the last few decades and with an increasing rate, studies have been performed by private, institutional, and academic sectors. These studies cover transportation through, from and to the Arctic area as well as infrastructures located in the Arctic. Transportation studies cover tramping and oil transportation (Cariou and Faury, 2015), container shipping (Xu et al., 2018, Cheaitou and Cariou, 2012) and also cruise shipping (Webb and Gende, 2015, Kaján, 2014, Dawson et al., 2016). Infrastructures in the Arctic have been studied from the perspective of ports with their capacity, development and specific requirements (Allen, 2011, Krivoshchekov et al., 2018); from the perspective of the access to hinterland through the different corridors and modes of transport (Alix, 2016, Antipov et al., 2017, Alklychev and Zoidov, 2012); and from a free zone perspective (Lavissière and Faury, 2019).

In this short time, a complete field of research has emerged and structured itself around a few major approaches. Not only are academic articles increasing in numbers, but books have also been dedicated to transportation in the Arctic with its specific issues. Thematic literature reviews have also been carried out. First, Lasserre (2014) looked at the studies that compared the Arctic and non Arctic routes. He based his research on 26 academic papers dealing with such comparisons. Then, Meng et al. (2017) carried out a literature review on the theme of Arctic navigation and commercial opportunities. This literature review is based on 25 academic papers. A few years ago, Theocharis et al. (2018) completed a third literature review on the different research methods used to compare the existing shipping routes and the Arctic routes. This thematic literature review on methodology is based on 33 academic papers. While these three major literature reviews focus on very specific aspects in the field of Arctic transportation, there is currently no systemic literature review of concerning the whole field. This leaves Arctic transportation scholars with no overall picture of the current academic literature in their field.

The aim of the present paper is to bridge this gap. We present a systematic literature review of the Arctic transportation field. We include academic articles treating the whole scope of Arctic transportation: geographically with a coverage of NSR and NWP; in terms of transportation with academic papers on ports in the Arctic; shipping in the Arctic; tourism; and legal, institutional and geopolitical implications that the exploitation of the Arctic as a transportation route creates. Moreover, we compare the concerns of the academic community with the professional concerns that professional press about this field addresses and exposes.

For this systematic literature review, we take a textometric approach. This linguistics-based method has been used in other management studies (Macke and Genari, 2019), but also in maritime studies (Mandjak et al., 2019, Fedi et al., 2019) in order to obtain an overall picture of the literature published in the field.

Section snippets

Characteristics of a systematic literature review

Systematic literature reviews began in medical science and then diffused to psychology, information technology, and social sciences (Senivongse et al., 2017). They cover a specific topic in the academic literature in an exhaustive manner. The first aim is to build a state of the art. Such reviews also enable academic communities to find new topics for research and to identify specific gaps to fill while summarizing knowledge on the specific topic. In the field of transportation, several types

Results concerning the frequency of the active forms

As explained above, the analysis in this study was performed on the full text of 386 articles. These articles amount for 2,663,095 occurrences of the forms. Consequently, there is an average of 6899 forms per article, which is consistent with results obtained is similar textometric literature reviews (see for example Mandjak et al., 2019). 44,995 different forms generate these occurrences, of which, 20,983 are hapaxes (0.79% of occurrences for 46.63% of forms). 489 forms were supplementary

Research findings and implications

The results presented in the study enable us to provide clear answers to our three research questions.

  • QR1: what is the state of the art considering Arctic transportation?

First, there is a large body of research on the topic, with 386 articles found and studied. This is comparable to similar studies on port marketing with 369 articles over 40 years on a major and worldwide topic (Mandjak et al., 2019). Moreover, research about Arctic transportation is experiencing a growing trend. There are

Conclusion

The textometric approach of the literature review allowed us to have a systematic overview of 386 academic articles dealing with Arctic transportation systems. These articles were selected using keywords that refer to the geography of the Arctic and maritime-related transportation in the Arctic. We were also able to compare this corpus of articles with corpora of recently published books on this topical issue and with a sample of the professional press. Such comparison helps us to answer our

Authors statement

All persons who meet authorship criteria are listed as authors, and all authors certify that they have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript. Furthermore, each author certifies that this material or similar material has not been and will not be submitted to or published in any other publication before its appearance in Transportation research part A:

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Dr. Yann Bouchery for the help provided in accessing the gathered the data.

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