THE MARITIME industry is vital to the global economy, serving as the backbone for international trade, tourism, energy production and food supply, carrying more than 80% of global cargo in terms of volume.
Supply chain resilience has become a key topic since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in maritime, as the world has realised the value of preparing for and responding to unexpected crises.
Sustainability also remains crucial, centred on economic, social and environmental themes, enabling businesses to ensure long-term growth and achieve competitive advantage.
Businesses have traditionally addressed resilience and sustainability separately, focusing on distinct practices to achieve performance in these respective areas. With the growing importance and overlapping nature of both concepts, however, there's increasing interest in exploring integrated approaches.
This shift raises critical questions: can initiatives be developed that simultaneously enhance both sustainability and resilience performance, reducing the need for separate strategies? Moreover, could these combined practices streamline efforts, improve overall performance and boost competitiveness for businesses?
Simply put, resilience-sustainability practice integration involves both resilience focused sustainability practices and sustainability-focused resilience practices. Resilience-focused sustainability practices are sustainable business practices that also help to strengthen the resilience capabilities of businesses, to survive and positively respond to short-term shocks and long-term changes.
Meanwhile, sustainability focused resilience practices are resilience activities that also contribute to sustainability performance for enterprises. Adopting resilience-focused sustainability practices is crucial for enterprises due to several reasons.
Disruptions or environmental impacts in this sector can trigger cascading effects on international trade and related industries, examples being the COVID-19 pandemic, the Suez Canal blockage caused by the MV Ever Given and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
These cases cost billions and affected multiple sectors. By integrating resilience and sustainability practices, businesses can efficiently achieve both objectives, saving time and effort in the short term. In the long run, this approach reduces operational and opportunity costs, enabling enterprises to allocate resources to other critical areas.
Building supply chain and business resilience is one of the four strategic priorities in NSW Ports 2025 Sustainability Strategy Report, highlighting that achieving resilience performance is one of the main focuses of sustainability.
To this end, the report emphasises ensuring security operations through completing annual cybersecurity risk management initiatives. Additionally, mitigating climate risk to operations and the supply chain is also crucial. Companies are encouraged to optimise analysis on port disruptions to gain comprehensive insights in real or near real-time and identify potential mitigations through digitalisation solutions.
By implementing these activities, businesses can withstand and adapt to changing conditions and recover positively from stresses, thereby enhancing resilience performance. Additionally, these initiatives create value through growth and innovation, strengthen strong stakeholder relationships and contribute to three SDG targets: Climate Action, Decent Work and Economic Growth, all as part of sustainability performance.
Given the significance of resilience and sustainability integration in the maritime industry, both the government and private sectors will need to play an active role. The government should play a guiding role in raising awareness among businesses and their stakeholders. This can be done through seminars, workshops and collaborations with major industry and port associations.
Additionally, the authorities might consider providing subsidies for businesses to train employees in these practices, similar to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA), which supports up to 50% of educational expenses.
For enterprises, the board of directors should be the first who understand the importance of resilience and sustainability practices integration and how to apply them practically. The importance of this integration should be embedded in the company's objectives, vision, mission and both medium- and long-term strategies. For example, in terms of business continuity planning, companies should also focus on sustainability performance, not just resilience.
Management should offer regular training sessions and send employees to related workshops and events, not only to raise awareness but also to provide different perspectives on implementing resilience and sustainability.
This article appeared in the August | September 2025 edition of DCN Magazine