With the purpose of promoting green truck technology in China’s Guangdong Province, the World Bank has sanctioned a grant of $4.2 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The fund will be used to educate more than 500,000 truck operators in this Chinese region about the benefits of using fuel-efficient technologies and logistics management.
China with its unprecedented growth in the manufacturing sector in the past two decades has also been a cause of concern for the environmentalists around the world. This growth in manufacturing has led to a tremendous growth in the movement of trucks for carrying freight. In the near future, it is bound to grow northwards at a much faster pace thereby leading to much more energy consumption and as a consequence more emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). Truck operators in China are not much concerned about energy efficiency and the fuel efficiency of trucks in China is 30 percent less than the ones in the developed nations. The main reason behind this poor fuel efficiency is the reluctance of Chinese truck owners to own up new technologies in view of the lack of knowledge and confidence. Besides, this sector in China is mainly dominated by small and privately owned truck operators, which don’t have access to modern logistics management and effective information sharing and coordination.
The Guangdong Green Freight Demonstration Project is aimed at helping the Provincial Government in Guangdong to address these challenges. “Through demonstration of green truck technology and green freight logistics, we hope that the energy-saving practices will be adopted more widely in the sector, so as to contribute to the government’s goal of reducing the energy intensity of the road freight sector by 12 percent by 2015 and 16 percent by 2020 from the 2005 level,” said Ke Fang, Senior Urban Transport Specialist of the World Bank and task manager of the project.
After the success of originally initiated pilot project in the year 2009 in Guangzhou, in collaboration with the Ministry of Transport of China, US Environmental Protection Agency, AusAid and Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities, this new project in Guangdong is expected to bring benefits to many stakeholders. World Bank hopes that by demonstrating the green freight technologies to the truck operators in the region, they will be able to reduce operating costs. Moreover, about 96.4 million residents in Guangdong are surely going to get relief from environmental hazards. Other industries will be able to reduce their carbon footprints and become more environmentally friendly. The total project cost is US$13.97 million, with the GEF grant financing 30 percent.
Since 1991, GEF has been active in funding the projects aimed at improving the world environment. Being the largest fund provider as of today in the field, GEF provides grants to developing countries and countries in transition for environment related projects.
Source: http://web.worldbank.org
