Suez transit volumes remain far below the pre-2024 baseline through 2026

Issued

July 18, 2026

Data cutoff

July 18, 2026

Horizon

197 days

Resolves by

January 31, 2027

Next review

September 15, 2026

Epistemic class

Forecast (modeled, not observed)

Evidence status

reported

How this resolves

Resolves TRUE if the Suez Canal Authority's published December 2026 monthly transit count is at least 25% below its published December 2023 count. If SCA figures are unavailable at the resolution date, IMF PortWatch's Suez transit series is the designated fallback, and the same 25% test is applied to it. If neither publishes a comparable figure, the forecast resolves UNRESOLVABLE rather than being scored on a substitute measure.

Resolution source: Suez Canal Authority navigation statistics; IMF PortWatch as designated fallback

Assumptions

• Transit volumes were reported to be running roughly 50-60% below pre-disruption levels through early 2026, leaving a large gap to close within the horizon.
• Carrier routing decisions are made on multi-month planning and insurance cycles, so even a decisive security improvement would take months to show in transit counts.
• Announced partial service resumptions represent a fraction of total pre-disruption traffic.

Leading indicators to watch

• Monthly Suez Canal Authority transit counts
• War-risk insurance premium quotes for Red Sea transits
• Whether major carriers (Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC) move from partial to default Suez routing

What would make this wrong

• A comprehensive, durable security settlement in the Red Sea prompting all major carriers to restore default Suez routing.
• The Suez Canal Authority materially changing how it counts or publishes transits, breaking comparability with the 2023 baseline.

Weak-source disclosure

Competing evidence

Credible sources point in different directions here. Both readings are shown rather than averaged into a single false number.

• Evidence toward normalization: several major carriers announced partial or planned Suez service resumptions during the first half of 2026, and trade coverage described a cautious return beginning. — Freight and logistics trade press — Red Sea routing coverage
• Evidence toward persistence: the same coverage reports most carriers retained Cape of Good Hope routing as default, with an industry expectation of continued diversions into 2027, and transits still running far below baseline in early 2026. — Freight and logistics trade press — Red Sea routing coverage

Known data gaps

• Warconomy still could not open an SCA press release or the SCA statistics portal directly (intermittently unreachable); the chairman's figures were read via regional press reporting of his MARLOG statement. Transcribing directly from an SCA publication remains the outstanding hardening step.
• The chairman's 2026-vs-2025 comparison is against an already-depressed base and does NOT measure the gap to the pre-disruption 2023 level, which is what this forecast's threshold tests. Independent analysis of PortWatch/DWT data putting 2025 transits 57-64% below 2023 is what supports the threshold, and that too was read via secondary coverage.

Methodology

Asks whether something that is currently disrupted will still be disrupted by a certain date, on the reasoning that shipping and insurance decisions unwind slowly.

Uncertainty: Coarse probability band reflecting how far the current value sits from the threshold relative to its recent volatility.

Validation: Resolved against the named publishing authority's own figure at the resolution date. Baseline: 'persistence' (assume today's state simply continues), which this model must beat to be worth running.

Full model card: Threshold persistence v1.0.

Sources

All forecast fields (accessible table)

Every field of this forecast record, as published.

Machine-readable: /forecasts/data.json