On 7th December, 2021, as a key milestone of the pilot project “Establish and Implement an Evaluation System for Multimodal Freight Transport Hub (MFTH) Management in China”, the interim workshop was jointly held by the Sino-German Cooperation on Low Carbon Transport (CLCT) and the Transport Planning and Research Institute (TPRI) of the Ministry of Transport of the People’s Republic of China (MoT).
The pilot project was commissioned by the CLCT project to TPRI with the purpose to support the MoT and other Chinese policy makers, operators, and relevant stakeholders on the further improvement of MFTH management performance toward environmental and climate-friendly freight transport in China.
Since its official kick-off in April, the pilot project team has developed a draft MFTH operation performance assessment indicator matrix, with support from the Deutsche GVZ Gesellschaft (DGG). To verify its practicability, the pilot project team has applied trials in 3 pilot hubs: a dry port in Lanzhou, an inland water port in Wuhan, and an airport in Zhengzhou. During the workshop, experts from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the China Railway Economic and Planning Research Institute, the China Academy of Railway Science (CARS), DGG, and Interporto Verona have jointly discussed the findings from the pilot hubs and provided comments on the further optimization of the indicator matrix.
Fright transport is the hard nut to crack when it comes to the decarbonisation of China’s transport sector. Therefore, the promotion of low carbon freight transport is of very high priority in the transport sector under China’s 14th Five-Year-Plan (2021-2025). The pilot project plays an important role in reaching the targets set out by the MoT in its Comprehensive Transportation Service 14th Five Year Plan, the development of which has reflected on the progress of this pilot project. The plan lists Multimodal Freight Hub Service Improvement as the first of 19 special tasks to improve transportation service development, and sets the goal of establishing over 120 multimodal pilots by 2025.
The pilot project is a direct contribution to China’s ambition to reach the peaking of its CO2 emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. The pilot project will be completed by mid-2022. By then, the developed MFTH operation performance assessment indicator matrix is expected to be a tool, which could be used by the MoT to comprehensively foster the low carbon development of multimodal hub services in China.
The CLCT project is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) and is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).
For more information on the pilot project and previous developments, please visit the pilot project website, our article on the Kick-off Workshop from April 2021, or contact us via transition-china@giz.de.
