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Smart Freight Centre

Smart Freight Centre, China

Enhancing China’s longer-term drive toward zero emission freight

Enhancing China’s longer-term drive toward zero emission freight

Every day, goods are delivered to millions of customers around the world, and demand continues to grow. According to the International Transport Forum, transport activity is expected to double between now and 2050, posing an exceptional challenge to the ambition of meeting climate targets.

China, as a global manufacturing hub and an ever-growing consumer market, has seen its freight sector and associated emissions grow exponentially over recent decades. If China wants to achieve its carbon neutrality targets by 2060, decarbonization of the country’s freight and logistics sector is an essential and urgent task.

Our partner Smart Freight Centre (SFC) is as a global nonprofit organisation for climate action in the freight sector and works with multinational companies globally, including in China. To this extent, in 2022 SFC China’s branch launched the multi-stakeholder Zero Emission Freight Initiative (ZEFI) as a partnership between research institutions, key industry players, and logistics and transportation companies to exchange information and build consensus on pathways towards decarbonizing the freight sector.

The Trafigura Foundation is supporting SFC’s action in China with a view to accelerating the transformation of China’s freight sector towards zero emissions. SFC’s plan will focus on three main activities.
Firstly, SFC will conduct a market survey to understand the needs of shippers, logistics service providers and carriers to allow targeted and effective interventions towards a zero emissions strategy.

Secondly, with the conclusion drawn from the market survey, SFC will develop a structured training curriculum and corresponding course materials for China on how to calculate, set targets, identify solutions to reduce logistics emissions, and collaborate with other industry and government actors.
Finally, the NGO will launch a training system in different formats (online training, webinars, in-classroom teaching), targeting over 1,000 companies. The training curriculum will be embedded as a core component of ZEFI training program to ensure sustainability and long-term uptake by freight and logistics actors in China.

The whole operation has the ambition of defining the first steps towards the development of a sustainable and zero emissions road-map for the logistics and freight sector in China, starting with the engagement of 60 participants by 2023 and targeting 1,000 companies after 2025.

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