The Baltimore bridge disaster is just the latest knock to global shipping and trade

• Supply-chain disruptions have repeatedly come under the spotlight in recent years.
• The Dali container ship's collision with the Baltimore Key Bridge is the latest risk to supply chains.

Supply chains are the backbone of global trade, but they've been largely taken for granted — until recently. Over the past few years, supply-chain woes have repeatedly come into the spotlight.

The vital links were brought to attention when President Donald Trump launched a trade war against China in 2018, prompting investors to reassess their reliance on the factory of the world.

Since then, global integrated supply chains just seem to keep getting disrupted — be it by the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia's war in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the Dali — a 984-foot-long cargo ship — collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The Port of Baltimore is now closed to vessels. Its reopening could take months, impacting trade and business.

Project44, a supply-chain platform, wrote in a report on Wednesday that it expected the auto industry to be disrupted, given that the Port of Baltimore is the top handler in the US for car imports and exports.

"The automobile industry is notoriously lean, meaning any disruptions will have ripple effects throughout the manufacturing process," Project44 wrote.

The domino effect is because of the "just in time" model that supply chains have been relying on for decades. This means materials are moved right before they're needed. The model keeps business operations extremely efficient — but it also opens them up to risks should just one part of the system fail.

"While just-in-time supply chain strategies have been the 'go-to' for 40 years, you can only expect something held together by chewing gum and shoelaces to last so long," Nari Viswanathan, a senior director of supply-chain strategy at Coupa, a platform for business spend management, told Business Insider.

Viswanathan says that "the world has been on a roller coaster that won't stop" over the past few years, which has, in turn, sent the world's supply chains into tailspin after tailspin.

Given that risks impacting supply chains are intertwined, they pose multifaceted risks to operations, Julie Gerdeman, the CEO of Everstream Analytics, a platform for supply-chain risk management, told BI.

Here are three key reasons supply chains just seem to keep screwing up in recent years.

1. Heightened geopolitical tensions

Geopolitics is one of the biggest drivers of risks in fields including economy and technology. Supply chains are no exception.

The issue first came to the fore in 2018 when Trump imposed high tariffs on a range of Chinese imports. It has become more amplified because of the tech rivalry between the US and China.

Examining ongoing conflicts in the Black Sea and the Red Sea, respectively, shows how geopolitical conflicts affect global supply chains.

Russia's blockade of the Black Sea amid the war in Ukraine is preventing wheat and sunflower supplies from Ukraine from moving freely to other parts of the world.

The Red Sea — a vital trade route between Europe and Asia — is under siege by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in response to the Israel-Hamas war.

To avoid being caught in the Red Sea attacks, cargo-carrying ships are staying away from the Suez Canal and rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope around the southern tip of Africa — but that's set to prolong journeys.

2. The climate crisis

In the summer of 2023, a historic drought affected rainfall that feeds into the Panama Canal, lowering the canal's water levels and limiting the number and weight of ships that can float on it. The drought was caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon and its warming effects, which were more severe in 2023 because of the climate crisis.

The fall in water levels at the Panama Canal caused a buildup in the number of ships waiting to cross the waterway, increasing transit time and prompting some vessels to reroute through the Cape of Good Hope.

Roughly 40% of US container traffic passes through the Panama Canal. By late November, the wait time for some ships looking to pass through the waterway was said to be about 20 days — up from five to seven days in October.

"The low water levels at the Panama Canal are a clear example of the effects of climate change in rainfall and weather patterns across the globe, which causes a ripple effect through the supply chain," a representative for the shipping giant Maersk told BI in September.

3. Shipping incidents

Ships transport 90% of the world's trade, and the vessels keep getting bigger and bigger on the back of ballooning trade volumes over the decades.

Capt. Rahul Khanna, the global head of marine risk consulting for Allianz, told BI's Geoff Weiss on Tuesday that container ships such as the Dali, which are typically used to transport consumer and packaged goods, had "grown up in size by as much as 1,500% in the last 50 years.'"

Allan Post, a veteran ship's officer, told The Conversation on Tuesday that at 984 feet, the Dali was just the "standard size these days."

With the increase in size, the risk that something goes very wrong also increases.

"A number of recurring themes have emerged in major incidents in recent years, many of which are a consequence of the increased size of vessels," Justus Heinrich, a shipping product leader at Allianz Commercial, a corporate insurer, said in a May 2022 report.

This is best exemplified by the case of the massive 1,312-foot Ever Given container ship, which ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021. The incident delayed about 16 million tons of cargo on hundreds of container ships at a time when COVID-19-related movement restrictions were already straining the global shipping system.

To be sure, the number of serious shipping accidents worldwide has declined in the longer term, as Allianz wrote in its report. But incidents involving large vessels — in particular container ships and large vehicle carriers — are resulting in disproportionately large losses.

In fact, Allianz reported that the cost of responding to incidents and clean-up was typically many times the ship's value.

"Larger vessels mean larger losses," Khanna said in the report.

Correction: March 28, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated when the Project44 report was published. It was published on Wednesday, March 27, not Tuesday, March 26.