Public policies and economic incentives are widely used as a strategy to stimulate the use of green technologies and low-emission practices in the waterborne transport sector. Since the Paris Agreement, countries have been encouraged to implement more strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to build resilience against climate change impacts in developing countries. This article presents a literature review on policies, regulations, and programs that represent economic incentives to promote alternatives to decarbonize maritime and inland waterway transport in sixteen countries, including Colombia. More than one hundred thirty sources of information were reviewed, including official portals of governments, port authorities and organizations, and scientific articles; therefore, the incentives found were grouped into three categories: project financing, differentiated port tariffs, and incentives to cover onshore power service fees. As a result of this review, it was found that differentiated port tariffs were the most common type of incentive. Finally, the specific case of Colombia was analyzed, which provides a deeper perspective of current policies and measures aimed at encouraging the decarbonization of waterborne transport and compares them with the international panorama.

Water quality indexes are a tool used to evaluate the physicochemical characteristics of a water body according to its use. The present study proposes the inclusion of oil and grease (OG) as a new water quality index (ICAM_PFF-GA) parameter for the preservation of marine biota in tropical areas, since it is a typical pollutant found and measured in water bodies, causing damage to the aquatic environment. The normalized curve for OG was defined based on the percentage of surviving microorganism under a lethal concentration exposure of OG. The ICAM_PFF-GA suitability was evaluated by its application to analyze marine water quality in the area of the sea outfall in the city of Cartagena, Colombia and comparing the trends of the outfall flow and the rainfall for 2017. Physical chemical data analyzed for the year 2017 shows that OG varies from 0.0 to 3.8 mg/L. The results show that the water quality index increases when rainfall and flow values increase for the rainy season. The ICAM_PFF-GA can be a tool to evaluate the water quality of marine waters affected by the discharge of waters with oil and grease.

The dispersion of air pollutants and the spatial representation of meteorological variables are subject to complex atmospheric local parameters. To reduce the impact of particulate matter (PM_2.5) on human health, it is of great significance to know its concentration at high spatial resolution. In order to monitor its effects on an exposed population, geostatistical analysis offers great potential to obtain high-quality spatial representation mapping of PM_2.5 and meteorological variables. The purpose of this study was to define the optimal spatial representation of PM_2.5, relative humidity, temperature and wind speed in the urban district in Cartagena, Colombia. The lack of data due to the scarcity of stations called for an ad hoc methodology, which included the interpolation implementing an ordinary kriging (OK) model, which was fed by data obtained through the inverse distance weighting (IDW) model. To consider wind effects, empirical Bayesian kriging regression prediction (EBK) was implemented. The application of these interpolation methods clarified the areas across the city that exceed the recommended limits of PM_2.5 concentrations (Zona Franca, Base Naval and Centro district), and described in a continuous way, on the surface, three main weather variables. Positive correlations were obtained for relative humidity (R² of 0.47), wind speed (R² of 0.59) and temperature (R² of 0.64).

El medio ambiente acuático se ha visto afectado en gran medida por los residuos provenientes de com­puestos farmacéuticos, estos no solo afectan los procesos biológicos utilizados para el tratamiento de aguas residuales municipales, sino que también sobrepasan los límites de la potabilización. El objetivo de este ar­tículo es realizar una revisión acerca de los aspectos de consideración con respecto a esta problemática, además las características físico químicas, y su detección en el agua, refiriéndose a esto último no solo como la identificación de estos contaminantes sino también la proporción de ello. En este contexto se discuten las limitaciones que se llevan a cabo con el cuidado de los cuerpos de agua no solo en la disposición de aguas residuales sino también del consumo humano.