Since the new century, countries in Africa have started a new round of rail network planning and construction which brings the completed different features together with the spatial organization of the railway network during the colonial period. Along with the strategic layout of “going out” with China’s railways, the organizational structure of the African railway network will make a tremendous change for the construction market, network organization, and gauge structure of the African railways. Based on the literature reviews, we analyzed and forecasted the evolution of railway network in Africa and discussed the spatial differentiation of the future construction market of the railways from the view of country and enterprise. The results show that the development of the African railway networks will experience three stages: 1850–1960, 1960–2010 and 2010–2050, and that the organization pattern of the African railway network has evolved from the “Hinterland-Port” model to the “Continental Integration” model. The development of railway technical standards tends to be integrated, the gauge type is changed from complicated to single, the gauge distribution is changed from broken to uniform. The contractor countries of the railway changed from English-French dominated to China dominated. The application of railway technical standards is influenced by technology dependence and path dependence and is mainly reflected in the two characteristics of “Chinese standard implantation” and “local standard retention”. The contractor enterprises of railway have a monopoly on the market of a country, CCECC and CRCC are leading, and the contractor enterprises are spatially characterized by four spatial distribution modes: single, continuous, jumping and comprehensive.

The submarine optical‐fiber cable (submarine cable) is a large connectivity infrastructure, which plays an important role in international communication, cyber‐physical systems, and even national security. Although submarine cable network interruption may cause serious consequences, researching its vulnerability has not attracted much attention. This paper proposes a quantitative method to measure the vulnerability of the submarine cable network and evaluates the influence of the upcoming trans‐Arctic cable (TAC) system on the submarine cable network of mainland China. To address this issue, first, the submarine cable network of mainland China is constructed. Further, methodology based on complex network and geospatial perspective is proposed to simulate the changes of network eigenvalues under different attacks and to quantitatively analyze the variation degree of network vulnerability. With the proposed method, the vulnerability of the submarine cable network of mainland China before and after construction of the trans‐Arctic cable system is compared. The results reveal the key node countries and sea channels of the submarine cable network of mainland China and show the significance of the TAC system.

A comprehensive understanding of international trade-linked transportation CO ₂ emissions is essential for achieving net-zero emission goals. However, the current simplified representation of transportation patterns obscures the heterogeneity of these CO ₂ emissions in international trade and limits the development of targeted decarbonization policies. This study developed an integrated and highly detailed model that incorporated commodity-scale modal shares and shipping carbon intensities for each trade pair, assisted by machine learning and observed voyage signals, respectively. The results indicate that transportation modal shares vary considerably across different scales. In 2021, trade-linked transportation contributed 971 million tonnes of CO ₂ emissions globally. When attributing CO ₂ emissions to countries and commodities, the simplification of modal share can lead to substantial biases through carbon-intensity weighting. By shifting the focus from end-of-pipe emissions to upstream demand, this study identified a decarbonization potential of 41.6% through optimizing transportation distances. The findings offer valuable insights for designing targeted mitigation policies for international freight transportation.