Asian ports are rethinking resilience — and the smart money is following

Record volumes, rerouted trade and a harsher climate are forcing Asia’s ports to stop treating resilience as a civil-engineering problem. Dr David Rissik, APAC Lead for Risk and Resilience at BMT, argues that the ports pulling ahead are the ones designing for flexibility across energy, data and operations — and that this is now a commercial question as much as an engineering one.

In February this year Port Hedland, the largest bulk export port in the world, cleared its harbour on a Friday and had ships back alongside by Sunday lunchtime. Cyclone Mitchell had passed through in between. Nothing broke. The port simply did what it had rehearsed, and the iron ore kept moving. Six months later, Shanghai and Ningbo closed for four days in a typhoon season so severe that one analyst called it “special”, and the queue of ships waiting for a berth worldwide climbed past anything we saw during the pandemic. In the same year, the Strait of Hormuz disruption sent services back around the Cape and redrew the schedules of every hub between Jebel Ali and Busan.

What strikes me about 2026 is not that ports closed; ports have always closed. It is which ones reopened fastest, and why. The answer, increasingly, has very little to do with the thickness of their quay walls.

This story was originally published by Port Strategy. Read the full story at Port Strategy →