Beyond Chokepoints: Rethinking Maritime Risk in an Era of Correlated Disruptions

Approximately 90 percent of global trade by volume moves by sea. The 2021 Ever Given grounding and the 2023–24 Panama drought each constrained hundreds of billions of dollars in annual trade. Black Sea grain disruptions affected 30 percent of global wheat trade. Let the vector of capacities C follow a joint distribution with mean vector μ and covariance matrix Σ whose off-diagonal elements capture correlated disruptions. Participating jurisdictions would gain access to real-time risk metrics and pre-committed alternative capacity, converting private adaptation into a partially collective good.