Generating greenhouse gas cutting incentives when allocating carbon dioxide emissions to shipments in road freight transportation

Abstract

Road freight transportation accounts for a great share of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In order to provide a common methodology for carbon accounting related to transport activities, the European Committee for Standardization has published the European Norm EN-16258. Unfortunately, EN-16258 contains gaps and ambiguities and leaves room for interpretation, which makes the comparison of the environmental performance of different logistics networks still difficult and hinders the identification of best practices. This research contributes to the identification of particularly meaningful principles for the allocation of GHG to shipments in road freight transportation by presenting an analytical framework for studying the performance of the EN-16258 allocation schemes with respect to accuracy, fairness, and the GHG minimizing incentive. In doing so, we continue previous studies that analyzed two important aspects of the EN-16258 allocation rules: accuracy and fairness. This study provides further insights into this allocation problem by investigating the incentive power of the different allocation schemes to opt for the GHG minimal way of running a road freight network. First, we complement the list of transport scenarios introduced in prior studies and present two novel scenarios. Second, we carry out a series of numerical experiments to compare the EN-16258 allocation rules with respect to accuracy, fairness, and the GHG minimizing incentive. We find that the results may differ significantly for the two scenarios, suggesting a case-by-case recommendation. This is particularly interesting because the first scenario confirms the results of the prior studies, while the second scenario rather contradicts them.