**1.1 Overview of the role of built environment of maritime transport and port sector in management of Covid-19 pandemic**

The environment is defined as the ecosystem, habitat and/or living place of any organism. It is the totality of the surroundings and all the content of the surroundings in which an organism lives including the natural forces and other species of livings things that create interdependency relationships for the organism's development and growth. The environments of an organism thus have or should be made to have inherent capacity to shield and protect it from the danger of injury, health-hazard,

damage and/or death from unnatural causes. Man over the ages have artificially harnessed and made habitable for himself environments that were initially considered unfavorable for human habitation by the use of technology. One such example is the marine environment, sea and/or offshore locations which were natural habitats for aquatic organism and other marine species. The exploration and exploitation of the resources of the marine environment over the years has led to the development of ships and marine structures of many kinds that support human adaptation and living in the marine environment in the course of his occupation. The same can be said for the urban and city centers of today which were initially natural forests turned built cities and urban centers by the entrepreneurial activities of humans. Thus we view the concept of the built environment as a concept that encompasses artificially made structures, platforms, buildings; urban, suburban and rural settlements and the relative facilities that accommodate humans to live, work and carry-out diverse socioeconomic, political and all forms of human activities that are necessary for and support collective human existence [1]. It therefore behooves on human operators to ensure that the built environment have capacity to maximize the protection of humans inhabitants from the danger of injury, health hazards, damage, and death from unnatural causes. This may be achieved by employing various means and strategies, but mostly the planned management approach which ensures that outcomes remain in line with behavioral objectives. According to Roof and Oleru [2], the concept of built environment is not limited to urban and suburban housing settlements that provide shelter for times spent indoor, it equally encompasses shelter for times spent at work related environment as more than 5% of average North American's workers time is spend in car.

In the Nigeria maritime industry for example, navigators and seamen live in ships and offshore structures for as long as 3 months before the next change of crew while dock workers and terminal operators spend consecutive 8 h work period each day in the seaports and terminal infrastructures in Nigeria. Thus ships, the seaport infrastructures, the terminals, the offshore structures etc. form the built environment of the maritime transport and ports industry in Nigeria whose capacity to provide protection to the inhabitants and users, cum shore-based stakeholders and/or contribute to programmes and schemes aimed at eliminating and curtailing the spread of life threatening infections, like the current Covid-19 pandemic must be enhanced.

The environment of maritime transport and port logistics sector is therefore, viewed as the totality of the maritime ecosystem including the sea, the coastal water zones, the inland water transport (IWT) zones, upon and/or in which the cargo ships, offshore floating and fixed productions, storage and offloading (FPSO) systems, fishing vessels, cruise ships, barges, river crafts, dredgers, seaports and Inland River ports, marine terminals, shipyards and docks, etc. as built maritime transport and ocean exploitation support structures, that accommodate maritime workers; that harness the ships and watercrafts for waterborne transport and other related operations. For purposes of developing models to enable the maritime sub-sector successful manage the fight against the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic; we summarized the built environment of maritime transport system that must be involved in the successful management of the exposure to and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic as shown in **Figure 1**.

**Figure 1** presents the built environment of the maritime transport system, indicating the various ships, port infrastructure and shore based maritime structures accommodating human activity types in the maritime industry while also interacting with, affecting and impacting on activities, operations, process and life in the various *Harnessing the Environment of Maritime Transport and Port Logistics Sector… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101587*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Summary of the built environment of maritime transport showing the hierarchy of relationships. Source: Prepared by Nwokedi [3].*

urban, suburban and rural land based settlements. They protection of the inhabitants of the above environment of maritime transport and the urban, suburban and rural land based settlements is the motivation for harnessing the maritime and port logistics industry against the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic [4]. Any management model or strategy that did not holistically involve the identified components of the environment of maritime transport, may not succeed, as the un-captured/uninvolved component or sub-system may end up re-infecting the entire maritime transport system, and subsequently, the land based urban and suburban settlements.

The China Country office of the World Health Organization [5] in Wuhan City was the first to identify in humans and report a novel type of corona virus disease in December 2019 which was afterwards officially referred to as the Covid-19. The Covid-19 disease spread geometrically with large numbers of confirmed cases in many parts of World within a very short time causing it to be characterized as a global pandemic. Since the Covid-19 disease is currently determined not to be an airborne disease, humans are determined to be the commonest direct agent of its spread among human populations and objects in the built environments and human settlements. By implication, transports infrastructures (maritime transport, air transport, road, rail, etc.) remains the major means of the transmission of the disease across international borders and among local populations. Consequently, the built environment of the maritime transport and shipping sector like other transport modes constitute potential and real major agents of spread of the virus; following which entire built environments of maritime transport must develop proactive instruments and strategies for managing the environment as identified above to curtail the spread the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nallon [6] notes the importance of quarantining ships for 14 days before enter the destination port following the first confirmed case of coid-19 disease onboard a container ship Gjertrud Maersk. The report notes that quarantining vessels will impact global seaborne trade negatively, that however is in line with management guidelines needed to ensure most importantly that the transmission and spread of the disease through the entire maritime industry to land based settlements environments is prevented and/or curtailed. Developing Covid-19 transmission and infection likelihood/risk model based on empirical evidences of the spread of the disease for seaports in Nigeria and ships calling to the ports as well as a framework and action plan for the entire maritime transport environment for the management and prevention of the spread of Covid-19 in Nigeria constitute the central aim of the study.
