Paper short abstract:

New digital solutions are claimed to be significant in making maritime logistics more sustainable. We examine the transition impacts of these infrastructural changes as concerns regarding the socio-cultural limits to sustainability, tracing how seamanship transforms within the green transition.

Paper long abstract:

New digital solutions are claimed to have a significant impact in making maritime logistics cleaner, safer and more efficient. However, many examples from the past show that when humankind tries to solve environmental problems, the solutions end up creating new challenges. Recently, attention has been directed at such challenges by using the notion of “transition impacts”, i.e. impacts that result from the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. In the context of the green transition in maritime logistics, concerns have been raised about security aspects of digitalization. In this paper, we examine these concerns primarily as concerns regarding the socio-cultural limits to and pre‐conditions for sustainability. Regarding digitalization as one tool of mitigation of and adaptation to climate change in maritime logistics, we ask: What other socio-cultural challenges does this attempt at addressing climate change in maritime logistics imply? Our answer utilizes an approach to socio-cultural sustainability that places heavy emphasis on cultural heritage as well as on the tools and skills needed to understand and transform the world towards sustainability, including literacy, creativity, critical knowledge, sense of place, empathy, trust, and risk. Regarding Finnish maritime logistics, we tentatively suggest that the main “transition impact” stems from various kinds of (to us) invisible infrastructural displacements. In this paper, we pay special attention to the socio-cultural dimensions in these infrastructural displacements, tracing how particular social components of the infrastructure such as seamanship, where physical (interactions and) working environments transit to more digital, transform within the green transition.