The Marine Transportation System (MTS) is a vital part of the nation’s supply chain. While the MTS can generally overcome any single disruption with limited cascading impacts, the impact of multiple disruptions can overwhelm it. Most recently, COVID, the Ukraine War, and other disruptions resulted in larger and more persistent supply-chain impacts than many stakeholders expected. To date, most research and contingency planning has focused on single-event disruptions such as an oil spill, natural disaster, or security incident. There has been little analysis of the cascading impacts of multiple disruptions that build on each other in complex ways. This suggests that modeling the impact of concurrent multiple vector disruptions and multiple MTS targets can help policy makers, business leaders, and others anticipate, plan for, mitigate, and rapidly recover from future disruptions. This is especially important as Coast Guard and DHS leadership seek to manage risks to an MTS increasingly reliant on complex technology and skilled labor, while remaining vulnerable to a multitude of threats, from cyber security to climate change.
Supported by the Center for Department of Homeland Security through the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE), Adam Rose is leading the project in collaboration with a team of government and private sector stakeholders to better understand the immediate and cascading consequences of multiple disruptions. The team is investigating pre- and post-incident mitigation and resilience strategies, and developing a user-friendly decision-support tool “MCAT.” It is intended for use by the US Coast Guard and others to improve risk management at the local, regional, and national level, and to apply the results to understand current supply-chain crises such as those from backups in ports and impacts of the Ukraine War.
The MCAT tool research is an extension of the successful “reduced-form” approach to transforming sophisticated complex models into accessible decision-support tools in the development of CREATE’s Economic Consequence Analysis Tool E-CAT and its extensions, which use a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the total economic impacts of individual and compound disruptions to the MTS. The project has benefitted from extensive stakeholder engagement that has suggested a variety of new directions that go beyond the scope of the first three-year plan.
Overall, we seek to develop new tools for understanding and measuring the economic (and other) impacts of complex, interacting disruptions of the MTS, focusing on real-world situations of contemporary policy interest to DHS, and to deliver tools and recommendations to the Coast Guard and other stakeholders as to potentially concerning scenarios and countermeasures that might minimize those impacts.
Publications:
Rose, A., Z. Chen and D. Wei. 2023. “Economic Impacts of Russia-Ukraine War Export Disruptions of Grain Commodities,” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 45: 645–65.
http://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13351
Chen, A., A. Rose, F. Roberts, and A. Tucci. 2025. “Economic Impacts of Fertilizer Shipment Disruptions on the Mississippi River,” Risk Analysis, forthcoming.