Enhancing Regional Freight Connectivity for Southeast Asia

As governments across Southeast Asia devise recovery plans to address the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, it is increasingly clear that investing in sustainable and resilient infrastructure will be critical to a post-pandemic recovery.

The regional study for Southeast Asia leverages the ITF Global Freight Model to analyse and quantify the environmental externalities and local benefits of current and planned freight transport infrastructure projects in the Southeast Asia Region,

• Identify potential connectivity and infrastructure gaps by 2050.
• Benchmark national freight transport policies against OECD best practices, focusing on opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions from building and using the respective infrastructure.
• Inform recommendations on closing the potential connectivity and infrastructure gaps and improving the sustainability of existing and future transport infrastructure and its use.

Four tasks of this study inform the overall objectives and are the basis for the proposed activities in this project’s scope. ITF brings deep expertise and experience in each of the four tasks.

• Regional Freight Transport Market Overview – This task aims to understand the region’s current freight transport infrastructure landscape and policy and institutional environment. For this purpose, the team will stocktake all current and potential future transport infrastructure projects in the region and identify the impact of different infrastructure options. It will also require the engagement of relevant public and private stakeholders to facilitate data and information collection and support fact-finding missions.
• Regional Freight Modelling and Freight Flow Assessment – The team will rely on the depth of our sectoral expertise and in-house modelling capacity at the ITF to forecast the regional trade and transport patterns in the region up to 2050, leveraging the data collected in Task 1. Baseline projections, which consider planned freight transport infrastructures, will be compared to climate ambition alternative scenarios to test the impact of policy choices, industry and technological development, as well as different trade facilitation on the flows in the region.
• Multifaceted Connectivity Enhancement Assessment – This task aims to conduct a connectivity enhancement assessment by considering both physical and non-technical aspects, including infrastructure gaps and bottlenecks, operational conditions, institutional readiness of the countries, and resilience and sustainability of the infrastructure development plans.

Knowledge Sharing and Stakeholder Engagement – It runs throughout the project execution considering its importance since the outcome of this project will be based on a co-creation process between all stakeholders involved. The effective participation of country administrations, implementing teams, local agencies, communities, and potential corridor users ensures the feasibility and relevance of the conclusions and recommendations.