How Do You Measure Green Culture in Shipping? The Search for a Tool Through Interviews with Swedish Seafarers

Today, the shipping industry faces important environmental challenges to reduce the impact of sea transport to the marine environment. In order to enhance compliance and encourage safe and efficient maritime operations, the implementation of a safety culture in both shore organisation and on board ships has been advocated. Similarly, it can be argued that a conscious ‘greening’ of an organisation’s culture may be necessary in order to meet legislative and societal demands, as well as embrace environmentally responsible values, beliefs and behaviours. The present pilot study describes the development and evaluation of a model designed to capture attitudes and perception among seafarers with regards to proactive environmental work in the shipping industry. The overall aim of the model is to enable measurement of the extent to which a ‘green culture’ is present within the shipping industry, and to identify factors that either facilitate or act as barriers to a green culture. Evaluation of the model was done through qualitative individual and focus group interviews with, in all, 13 active Swedish seafarers during the autumn of 2014. The findings show that the model captures the sought after mechanisms fairly well and shows some promise. Future work is needed to further refine and test the model in a larger setting, in order to provide a robust picture of the seafarers’ view on ‘green’ shipping.