Not What It Seems: Pacific Trade Data Quality Limits the Understanding of Maritime Decarbonisation’s Economic Impacts on the World’s Most Climate-Vulnerable States
Abstract
This paper seeks to better understand the availability of datasets pertinent to the baselining, monitoring and forecasting of economic impacts resulting from implementation of the IMO’s Revised 2023 Strategy targets. The study focuses on Kiribati and Vanuatu, comparing five alternative sources of merchandise trade and transport cost statistics relevant to the IMO-led Comprehensive Impact Assessment (CIA) process, including data from; a. national customs authorities collected at source b. National Statistics Office (NSO) publications available online, c. the UN COMTRADE platform, d. UNCTAD’s Trade & Transport dataset and e. the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), specifically the most recent version of its database (GTAP-11). Data from c., d. and e. were widely utilised across the various tasks of the IMO’s CIA. The paper demonstrates the inherently poor quality of Pacific data in terms of availability, coherence and aggregation. Whilst implications of these findings with respect to the results of the IMO-led CIA currently unknown, the report concludes by suggesting that the requisite data and modelling architecture to comprehensively baseline and monitor economic impacts on these climate most-vulnerable states doesn’t currently exist. The report suggests that the timely roll-out of UNCTAD’s ASYCUDA system and the identification of a global economic modelling architecture with sufficient geographic resolution to capture economic impacts at the smallest scales will be required in order to establish this capacity in time for the scheduled introduction of IMO midterm measures on 1 March 2027.
James Stewart1, Peter Nuttall2,3, Maria Sahib2 and Serguey Maximov Gajardo4
1UCL Energy Institute
2Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport
3University of Fiji
4UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources
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