Transport Resilience in South Asia: a Discussion with Prof. Adolf Ng

Prof. Adolf K.Y. Ng is a Professor of Global Value Chains at Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College in China and Université Laval, Quebec, Canada.

Prof. Ng is also the Chief Editor of The Maritime Economist, which is the official magazine of the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME).

What effects does climate change have on ports and the roles they play in global supply chains?

The impacts are diverse depending on the geographical areas the ports are situated in. On the one hand, rising sea levels, flooding, and higher frequencies of storms and hurricanes can damage port infrastructure and lead to shutdowns. On the other hand, decreasing water levels in rivers due to droughts means larger ships can’t cross through.

This disrupts port operations and will likely increase the cost and prices of handling cargo and they won’t be able to go through their next mode of transportation like road or rail.

Just in a matter of days, supermarkets will start facing shortages, and factories that depend on imported raw materials and semi-finished goods will have to halt production. This will have serious impacts on the local/regional economy.

Ports can also be indirectly affected by the impacts of climate change because of their integrated networks. For example, a storm can affect multiple ports or cargo deliveries along a supply chain network.

What specific issues are island states like Sri Lanka and the Maldives facing?

Usually, they are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and their capacities are usually not very high. They are highly dependent on trade and connection to sustain their economy and society.

Since island states are surrounded by water, ports are normally the starting and ending points in their transport networks, so trade and people’s mobility depend largely on the quality of air transport and marine transport. They usually don’t have many alternatives, such as land or rail, if ports are disrupted.

They immediately feel the impacts of ports being shutdown due to natural hazards and become trapped. Sri Lanka, as an island state, has a large landmass and resources which offer alternative transport modes such as roads, but countries like the Maldives consist of scattered archipelagos that are much smaller and not as self-sustainable.

They also don’t have as much transport infrastructure as they are limited to specific ports as their only connection point with the rest of the world or their territory.

What about the domino consequences on landlocked countries like Nepal or Bhutan?

Landlocked countries and regions like Northeastern India depend more on their often bottleneck connections with neighboring countries and communities.

Their physical constraints due to climate change impacts make it difficult to find alternative modes of transport if roads are blocked or damaged. For example, resorting to air or rail transport out of necessity can be much more expensive.

Landlocked areas need substantial financial commitments to build up the necessary infrastructure and capacities to support these alternatives.

On the other hand, many of their exports are dependent on international agreements and moving goods from the landlocked region to a maritime port. Politically, these ports don’t belong to them, so they have to negotiate and make agreements to find a solution.

Landlocked areas need substantial financial commitments to build up the necessary infrastructure and capacities to support these alternatives.

Your previous studies in dry ports have shown that developing countries are more cluster-orientated, could you explain what this means?

I’d like to use the example of Northeastern India again, which is mostly a tea-growing area. Many tea farms and companies here are quite small, so they struggle to reach a lot of markets because of the high logistical costs associated with smaller cargo exports.

When climate change affects their transport networks, these smaller companies can conglomerate their cargos together to overcome disruptions and increase their competitiveness.

Dry ports may not necessarily be the most efficient and many have low-quality transport connections, but they often play a very important part in promoting regional development and local production to become competitive and benefit local economies.

Considering the interconnectivity between roads, sea, and air transport, what climate change impacts are we seeing in Asian countries?

Apart from climate change, the transport sector is also greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and changing relationships between different countries.

When we consider the result of climate change on Asian countries, we need to keep in mind that everything is about offshoring, and this causes specialization in different parts of the world.

I would like to share a new concept – we are actually seeing more friend-shoring than offshoring. Different economic blocs are trying to redesign their structures based on their trade relationships.

Based on this transformation, climate change is also helping to accelerate this development. Climate change is causing certain kinds of hazards and impacts and port disruptions, and it is possible to address this problem. But a lot of the infrastructure and facilities need capital-intensive investments to build up their resilience. This means that the global supply chain or offshoring might not be as attractive as it was before.

By transforming global supply chains into more regional or offshoring to friend-shoring, in my opinion, climate change is going to accelerate this transformation process.

How do you view the arguments related to climate adaptation versus mitigation?

From my more than 10 years of research on this topic so far, we have always seen that much more attention has been put on mitigation. One of the most important is that we have international frameworks like the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement that are trying to control greenhouse gas and CO2 emissions.

Mitigation is about trying to slow down climate change and its impacts. We try to develop international best practices and standards so we can expect different sectors, areas and countries to establish something similar.

Adaptation is quite different – we already accept that certain types of hazards have already taken place, so based on these problems, how are we going to do something about them and make ourselves more resilient?

Adaptation is fundamentally a very local, bottom-up aspect. Will there be a national or international best practice that we can follow? It is possible but if we try to assume that problems related to adaptation planning can be implemented only based on international best practices, this will be a very wrong approach.

If we are facing a particular issue related to adaptation, once we have created a best practice, we also need to be very careful not to try and make it a (rigid) key performance indicator.

We need to understand the nature of this problem and can we look through different types of local experiences and try to match these approaches to our contexts.

I think that we should be more careful that adaptation is not some kind of one-size-fits-all strategy. This happens in a lot of ports when they conduct activities like environmental planning in the first place.

Very often they put mitigation and adaptation efforts into the same plan. While they are arguably similar, both mitigation and adaptation require their own plans.

Prof. Ng spoke with Russell Isaac, Regional Expert, Communications and Knowledge Management at ADPC.