According to Marat Zembatov, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute of State and Municipal Management, Higher School of Economics; Member, Russian-Omani Business Council, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation; Expert, BRICS Business Council Group on Transport and Infrastructure; Ph.D. in Economics:
"The previous Logistics Insights article examined what can be measured in global logistics and where the power of an index runs out. It turned out that quite a lot can be measured: country-level logistics performance. Port connectivity. Ocean freight. Container rates. The cost of rail transit. Pressure on global supply chains. War-risk insurance premiums. The anchorage queue. Canal transit times. The time it takes to move cargo from point A to point B. All of this can be measured with the tools we have today—with the indexes and rates already in place.
And yet, after all the tables, charts, rankings, and freight quotes, the central professional question remains. What is a logistics manager supposed to do when the index is still quiet, but the route is already entering a zone of imminent risk?
The classical indexes answer that question only after the fact. They are useful once the event has already been priced in, such as when rates climb, insurance gets more expensive, a ship sails around the Cape of Good Hope, and the anchorage queue or the border interchange point backlog becomes an unpleasant surprise. At that point, the indexes faithfully report shifts in the market that have already occurred (and even then, many of them do so with a significant lag).
But today, logistics needs a different analytical approach. It needs the ability to spot the moment when the market has not yet shifted for good, but the conditions for movement have already changed. It needs an index with predictive (or forecasting) capability that surpasses today’s transport analytics toolkit.
That is how the idea for a new index was born—the Transport Connectivity Risk Index. Its goal is easy to state and hard to execute: to estimate the probability of a transport disruption before that disruption is reflected in a commercial invoice. In other words, to see not the price of consequences, but the accumulation of causes—and to turn that observation into a measurable quantity. This does not displace the existing indexes (BDI, SCFI, CCFI, Drewry WCI, the Freightos Baltic Index, HARPEX, ERAI, GSCPI, LPI, LSCI, PLSCI, CPPI, and others). Every achievement of modern freight-traffic arithmetic is taken into account. The new index is meant to take what is best from the existing ones and put that best to good use for everyone.
From the LPI, for instance, it borrows an understanding of country-level logistics performance. From the LSCI and PLSCI—a quantitative measure of the maritime connectivity of countries and ports. From the CPPI—container terminal productivity. From the BDI—a daily financial “temperature” reading for dry bulk. With the SCFI and CCFI, you can take the pulse of the Chinese container “heart” of global logistics. From the Drewry WCI and the Freightos Baltic Index—the cost of moving a container along the world’s main lanes. From HARPEX—the medium-term cost of container-ship tonnage. From the Baltic Air Freight Index and TAC Index—the rush of high-value goods into air freight when needed. From ERAI (close to our hearts!)—the cost of the Eurasian rail “Plan B” (where else can you go around the bottlenecks of global ocean logistics?). From GSCPI—macro-level pressure on global supply chains. From the PMI Suppliers’ Delivery Times and the Logistics Managers’ Index—manufacturing and warehousing delays. Phew—trying not to leave anyone out!
But all of this is only the first—and the most familiar and straightforward—descriptive layer of the future tool. It speaks to the market, volumes, timing, and cost.
The second layer of the new index has to address route security. This layer takes in reports of maritime incidents from UKMTO, JMIC, and the IMB. Joint War Committee determinations of war-risk zones. War-risk insurance premiums for the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Taiwan Strait, and other vulnerable waters. Data on port closures, canceled port calls, longer canal transit times, congested anchorages, AIS signal loss (a popular practice these days), and shifts in standard routing patterns. And, of course, the diversions around the Cape of Good Hope (where else are you supposed to run from Somali pirates?), the sanctions compliance of a shipment, unexpected inspections at borders (or out at sea), and the legal robustness of the contract. As in any difficult period, you need a Plan B today. And logistics may well be the professional field where that Plan B is in greater demand than anywhere else. The third layer of the index is meant to address precisely that—overland substitutability. An ocean route can close in a single day. Rail and road detours become a viable alternative only when there is capacity to absorb the traffic. Here you have to factor in the cost of a TEU and an FEU, the transit time and how much it can vary, the number of transshipments, the availability of flatcars, the throughput of the border crossing, and the performance of the terminal, as well as the availability of locomotive power, port transshipment (on the Caspian, for instance), the regularity of ferry service, the time it takes to process shipping documents, cargo insurance, and the risk of a consignment being detained. Seen this way, the map of Eurasia becomes a proving ground—for whether cargo is ready for a new alternative route, for whether logistics professionals are ready for a new index, for whether shippers are ready for new contract terms. And for whether all of us, collectively, are ready for the new reality and its unpredictable risks. And in that new reality, the new index turns out to be very timely.
The Transport Connectivity Risk Index measures stress along cargo routes and the probability that cargo will be delivered to the consignee in spite of everything. Looking at when and how the index applies, there are essentially three sets of conditions. First, conditions of current stress, in which the index shows that prices are already rising, insurance is already going up, ships are already changing course, and the railway is already absorbing the overflow—in other words, the connectivity risks have already materialized, and we now need to calculate the financial impact on all participants in the transport chain and to forecast what comes next. Second, conditions in which only signs of a future rupture have appeared. Here a forecast of how events will unfold is more valuable than anything. The ability to use the index to correctly read a rise in war-risk premiums without a rise in freight rates, or a string of maritime warnings without a halt in shipping, or shifts in AIS behavior without an official closure of a strait, is what allows you to avoid major financial and other losses. And third, conditions in which, after a crisis, tensions ease. Here the market is already gearing up to return to normal cargo flows. Insurance risk drops, port calls return, the length of the detour shrinks, and the rail crossing clears out. Calculating the price effects of an approaching easing in time is sometimes no less important than spotting an oncoming price surge. The reason is always the same—saving money.
An index like this is needed, first and foremost, by practitioners. By the logistics manager—to book a detour in advance. By the cargo owner—to recalculate inventory. By the carrier—to figure out where a ship or a train can generate revenue without taking on unacceptable risk. By the insurer—to separate a hazardous zone of operational activity from a dead zone of panic. By the bank—to underwrite a contract with transport risk priced in. And by the government—to see which corridor needs investment before the next crisis.
That is what the new—calculable—meaning of transport analytics is all about. The logistics of turbulent times needs a forecasting tool, because the hope that the costs calculated at the start of a route will hold by the end of it is a nice idea but, today, unfortunately, an unlikely one. And because the warning bell of risk always rings a little before the price storm hits, it can in fact be measured.
And that is why, starting with this issue, Logistics Insights is delivering not only meaning, but indexes as well. And the new Transport Connectivity Risk Index is doing its job right now—alerting the market in order to keep the damage to a minimum.
If the previous issue of Logistics Insights asked the question, this issue gives the answer: the index exists, and you can start using it today.
What did we use as the foundation for this index, what values has it posted during recent crises, and what can we read from it today?
In short, the TCRI brings together and processes the values of 18 existing indexes, rates, rankings, and other quantitative indicators drawn from transport and logistics monitoring. To those it adds the maritime information centers that collect and promptly publish information on threats to shipping safety.
On a retrospective basis, the TCRI was tested across a range of conflict periods over the past several years: the emergence of Somali piracy in 2010–2012, the Arab Spring in 2011, the recurring tensions between India and Pakistan starting in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, the Ever Given grounding in March 2021, the escalation in the Taiwan Strait in 2022, the drought in the Panama Canal in 2023–2024, the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in 2023–2024, and the conflict in Sudan beginning in 2023. In every case, the TCRI provided early warning anywhere from 2 to 26 days ahead. The one exception was the case of Ever Given captain Krishnan Kanthavel on March 23, 2021. There the TCRI did not respond ahead of time—only on the day of the incident itself. But even the captain himself, just half an hour before the grounding, had no idea that two Egyptian pilots would come on board and speak to each other only in Arabic. The captain could not understand a word of what they were saying, and they spoke in raised voices, failing to coordinate with each other and guide the vessel through the canal right at its entrance.
And of course, Logistics Insights has been watching and measuring every twist of the Gulf conflict since February 28. The result is the TCRI chart shown here.
You cannot say that the index’s forecasting function got out in front of this one. But what you cannot take away from the TCRI is its day-to-day ability to measure the “temperature” of global logistics. Yes, the transport system of the global economy is highly volatile right now (any reading above 60 is already a sign of systemic connectivity failures on a global scale). But after yesterday’s flare-up, a path back toward easing is already beginning to take shape. And who knows—maybe in three or four weeks the world will be back to pre-crisis TCRI readings (somewhere between 20 and 30).
But that does not mean we should stop measuring the “temperature” of global logistics. Quite the opposite. A locomotive engineer wears his vigilance monitor at all times. In the same way, we will treat what we now have not as a “remote engineer vigilance control system,” but as a health monitor for global logistics in the form of the new TCRI. And we will use this tool in the hope that it will always show the right readings. Today the TCRI stands at 70.96—variable, with flare-ups in places"
Transport Connectivity Risk Index readings for the period from January 1 through May 6, 2026.
Read next content