Foreword of the special issue co-editors

Abstract

Logistics and freight transport show a rapid growth in the last two decades, driven by globalisation of production, distribution and sourcing and parallel to the growth of trade, which was almost double of the growth of production. The value added by this economic sector has increased accordingly and is estimated at about 10% of the total gross domestic product of the EU. As logistics and transport are not clustered as one sector in the statistics of national account this estimation is rough but it gives a good impression of the relevance for economic growth and prosperity. In recent years, the importance of big logistics hubs has been increasingly recognised such that they have become an intrinsic element of Transeuropean Networks according to the recently published guidelines. The efficient use of links, hubs and nodes has been a traditional field of logistics research. In a long-term view, dynamic efficiency of logistic systems implies not only individual cost minimisation but also a significant reduction in energy consumption and environmental costs. Therefore, the main issue of this volume is the combination of green and efficient logistics to guide this sector to a sustainable path. Transport’s share of total GHG emissions in the EU was 19% in 2009, and the contribution of freight transport to this figure is about one-third. This seems to be a modest share but one has to recognise that after a suitable disaggregation of GHG producers every sector appears to be small, such that ‘‘being a small contributor’’ cannot be used as a general argument to exclude a sector from contributing to the GHG reduction targets. These targets have been set rather ambitiously in the EU. In the medium term (until 2020), about 20–30% of CO2 emissions should be reduced, and in the long run (until 2050), this target is set at 80%, based on the 1990 level. For the transport sector, the target is slightly more modest at 60% until 2050 (see the EC White Paper 2011, Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area—Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system). But compared with the trend development which points to a further increase in CO2 emissions of more than 50% until 2050, this appears most challenging and implies that freight transport and logistics need to converge to a zero-carbon world within less than 40 years. The instruments for achieving such a radical change are manifold: energy efficient technology, alternative fuels, increased use of environmentally friendly transport modes, organisational adjustment or redesigning the interfaces M. Browne University of Westminster, London, UK