Facilitating Trade Through Competitive Low Carbon Transport

As Vietnam pursues a path of sustainable growth, inland waterway transport and coastal shipping offer viable alternatives to the traditional road sector, particularly when environmental costs are taken into consideration. This report profiles Vietnam s waterborne transport sector and proposes interventions to improve its performance.

Like many of its Southeast Asian neighbors, Vietnam faces the twin challenges of sustaining economic growth and protecting the environment. On the one hand, the impressive poverty reduction and growth performance attained over the past 25 years is now challenged by slower global and domestic growth, more intense international competition for foreign direct investment, and the need to drive domestic productivity improvements. On the other, Vietnams vast natural resourcesas represented by two major river deltas, a long coast line, and a multitude of rivers and canalsand the large portion of its population leaving in proximity to bodies of water or dependent upon water- and weather-driven sectors of the economy, such as rice production and aquaculture, demand that decisive steps be taken to reduce the carbon intensity of the Vietnamese economy. This report argues that promoting the use of waterborne transport in Vietnams freight logistics can be an effective way of both facilitating economic growth and reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and local pollutants. In particular, it shows that investments in capacity expansion and better maintenance provision at the countrys main navigable waterways and coastal shipping routes can result in logistics cost savings, which promote trade and drive growth. But they would also result in meaningfully lower emissions in a sector that remains less green than it could be, on account of the use of relatively small and inefficient vessels. The report offers three main contributions. First, by profiling Vietnams inland waterway sector it sheds light on a critical component of the economy that has nevertheless remained opaque. Second, it proposes and quantitatively assesses well-defined public- and public-private investment opportunities in waterborne transport that can improve sector performance. And third, it explicitly takes into account the value of changes in local pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions in a preliminary economic appraisal of the interventions proposed. As the need to strengthen Vietnams trade competitiveness intensifies, the inland waterway and coastal shipping sectors, often overlooked, can be part of the reform and modernization agenda. This report intends to contribute to that important conversation.

Technological revolutions have increased the world’s wealth unevenly and in ways that have accelerated climate change. This report argues that achieving The Paris Agreement’s objectives would require a massive transfer of existing and commercially proven low-carbon technologies (LCT) from high-income to developing countries where the bulk of future emissions is expected to occur. This mass deployment is not only a necessity but also an opportunity: Policies to deploy LCT can help countries achieve economic and other development objectives, like improving human health, in addition to reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs). Additionally, LCT deployment offers an opportunity for countries with sufficient capabilities to benefit from participation in global value chains and produce and export LCTs. Finally, the report calls for a greater international involvement in supporting the poorest countries, which have the least access to LCT and finance and the most underdeveloped physical, technological, and institutional capabilities that are essential to benefit from technology.

While trade exacerbates climate change, it is also a central part of the solution because it has the potential to enhance mitigation and adaptation. This timely report explores the different ways in which trade and climate change intersect. Trade contributes to the emissions that cause global warming and is itself also affected by climate change through changing comparative advantages. The report also confronts several myths concerning trade and climate change. The Trade and Climate Change Nexus: The Urgency and Opportunities for Developing Countries focuses on the impacts of, and adjustments to, climate change in developing countries and on how future trade opportunities will be affected by both the changing climate and the policy responses to address it. The report discusses how trade can provide the goods and services that drive mitigation and adaptation. It also addresses how climate change creates immense challenges for developing countries, but also new opportunities to promote trade diversification in the transition to a low-carbon world. Suitable trade and environmental policies can offer effective economic incentives to attain both sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

Transport provides access to public services for the poor, opens up trade opportunities, and maximizes the benefits of urbanization: the mobility of people and goods drives development. So how can we protect the role of transport in times of scarcer fuels, costly and harmful carbon emissions, and the rising threat of extreme weather events? This is the central question that this book seeks to answer. Turning the Right Corner: Ensuring Development through a Low-Carbon Transport Sector finds that adopting new vehicle technologies and alternative fuels will not be enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions from transport: new patterns of mobility will also be needed. In developing countries where past infrastructure investments have not yet locked in particular transport modes, there is an opportunity to contain emissions by harnessing low-emission modes of transport. The book argues that the transition to low-carbon mobility is not only urgently needed if economies are to avoid becoming locked into high-carbon growth, but is also affordable. It outlines how countries can combine policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with broader sector reforms that generate new fiscal resources to finance the transition in addition to carbon financing and international assistance. Turning the Right Corner: Ensuring Development through a Low-Carbon Transport Sector will be of interest to policy makers, academics, and development practitioners with an interest in transport. It will help decision makers better understand how to contain the transport sector's contribution to climate change and protect transport infrastructure and services from severe weather events.

Vietnam needs to strengthen economic resiliency and reinvent its drivers of growth. More efficient logistics in export, import and domestic supply chains can drive future economic growth by increasing productivity. This report assesses performance chokepoints in Vietnam’s supply chains and proposes public sector interventions to address them.

Climate change remains a global challenge requiring international collaborative action. Another area where countries have successfully committed to a long-term multilateral resolution is the liberalization of international trade. Integration into the world economy has proven a powerful means for countries to promote economic growth, development, and poverty reduction. The broad objectives of the betterment of current and future human welfare are shared by both global trade and climate regimes. Yet both climate and trade agendas have evolved largely independently through the years, despite their mutually supporting objectives. Since global emission goals and global trade objectives are shared policy objectives of most countries, and nearly all of the World Bank's clients, it makes sense to consider the two sets of objectives together. This book is one of the first comprehensive attempts to look at the synergies between climate change and trade objectives from economic, legal, and institutional perspectives. It addresses an important policy question - how changes in trade policies and international cooperation on trade policies can help address global environmental spillovers, especially GHG emissions, and what the (potential) effects of (national) environmental policies that are aimed at global environmental problems might be for trade and investment. It explores opportunities for aligning development and energy policies in such a way that they could stimulate production, trade, and investment in cleaner technology options.

This book looks in detail at how globalisation has affected activity levels in maritime shipping, aviation, and road and rail freight, and assesses the impact that changes in activity levels have had on the environment.