The North Pacific route will surpass the North Atlantic as the world’s most busy trading corridor in terms of freight volume (in tonne-km), growing 100 percentage points faster than the North Atlantic, as shown in International Transport Forum’s (ITF) Transport Outlook 2015.
According to the ITF’s findings, the Indian Ocean corridor will see large growth, with international freight transport volumes set to grow more than fourfold by 2050. Average transport distance across all modes are expected to increase 12% in the face of shifting global trade patterns.
As a result of volumes quadrupling, CO2 emissions from freight transport will grow by 290% by 2050. Freight will replace passenger traffic as main source of CO2 emissions from surface transport, ITF said during presentation of their findings held on Tuesday at the OECD headquarters in Paris, France.
“The foreseeable increase in global freight represents an unprecedented challenge for the world’s transport systems,“ said ITF Secretary-General José Viegas . “Increasing capacity constraints in transport can act as a brake on economic growth. A quadrupling of freight emissions can seriously undermine climate change mitigation.”
Viegas pointed to four action items that would help to avoid such a scenario:
Full report is available here.