Enterprise Resilience of Maritime Container Ports to Pandemic and Other Emergent Conditions

Emergent and future conditions that influence the global container port industry include pandemics, regulations, markets, technologies, environments, organizations, energy resources, workforces, supply-chain partners, and others. It is critical to simultaneously formulate and adapt multiple strategic plans of individual ports to the above stressors. The Port of Virginia (POV) generates 400,000 jobs, or roughly 11% of jobs across Virginia, and has an overall annual economic impact of $92 billion. POV is currently investing $800 million to expand its annual container throughput capacity by 40 percent by the end of 2020. This investment supports initiatives outlined in the port’s 2065 master plan through the investigation of different scenarios that impact emergent and future port conditions. This paper describes the most and least disruptive scenarios of emergent and future conditions, including hybrid scenarios involving the COVID-19 pandemic. The degree of disruption is measured by the changes in priorities of a port’s strategic plan, in particular for the rank order of investments by their individual contributions to the strategic goals of the port. The analysis described herein includes sixteen strategic goals, 31 strategic plan investments, and several dozen emergent and future conditions. The analysis assembles the emergent conditions into scenarios. The most disruptive scenarios are selected for contingency planning, enterprise risk management, and research & development. Seven scenarios are available for future exploration in detail: (1) Funding Decrease (2) Natural Disaster (3) Green Technologies (4) Pandemic (5) Increased Automation (6) Alternative Financing (7) Population Changes. Green Technologies, Pandemic and Alternative Financing are explored in detail in this paper. The results of this paper are thus both a methodology for any port to address its emergent and future conditions via its strategic plans, and also a case study of enterprise resilience of a major container port of the United States. The results will be of interest to port owners and operators, risk managers, transportation agencies, regulators, freight shippers, human resource managers, the military, and others.