IAPH Unveils Five Port Readiness Tools in London

The International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH) unveiled five tools to help ports advance their readiness for clean fuels, shore power, sustainable cruise operations and shared data standards. The announcement was made during the World Ports Conference 2026, held at Olympia, London, from November 3 to 6.

The flagship tool is the Port Readiness Level (PRL) for clean fuel bunkering cargo, developed by IAPH together with the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) under the Clean Energy Marine Hubs (CEM-Hubs) initiative. It is designed for ports seeking to export, import or tranship clean fuels as bulk liquid cargo, and assesses governance, safety, infrastructure and market maturity across nine levels of development. Shipping lines, classification society Lloyd's Register, Transport Canada and the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) took part in its development, with assessment support from Argus. The related CEM-Hubs document notes that around 80% of oil flows pass through a small number of key maritime chokepoints, that shipping moves close to 80% of global trade by volume, and that energy products accounted for 36% of seaborne trade in 2021.

The second tool is version 2.0 of the PRL for clean marine fuel bunkering, a fuel-agnostic update to the version launched in 2023. The third is the OPS Implementation Levels methodology, drawn up by a working group under IAPH's Climate and Energy Committee, which sets out a nine-step method for ports to self-assess their readiness to offer shore power (OPS), providing common terminology for planning and tracking progress on these projects.

For the cruise sector, the relevant IAPH committee developed the Sustainable Cruise Port Accreditation Framework, which assesses the sustainability maturity of port authorities and cruise terminals across six thematic areas of the World Ports Sustainability Program. The fifth tool is a common digital infrastructure standard for supply chain resilience at container ports, developed by IAPH's Data Collaboration Committee together with the logistics community. It defines a set of 39 data timestamps, endorsed by UN/CEFACT, for port logistics events such as estimated time of arrival or container discharge at terminal, and is still under development.

The conference brought together 700 supply chain professionals from 70 countries. IAPH Managing Director Patrick Verhoeven noted that the association aims to support its members in their decarbonization process without expecting every port to become a hub for bunkering, clean cargo or shore power, while acknowledging that many ports are keen to draw on their peers' experience. In this context, Ingrid Boqué, Chair of IAPH's Data Collaboration Technical Committee and Director of Institutional Relations at Port de Barcelona, moderated sessions on data sharing, artificial intelligence and supply chain resilience, and presented the committee's 2027 work program to the IAPH general assembly.