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 in its current version some 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 aims to overcome the ambiguities of EN-16258 concerning the allocation of GHG emissions to shipments in road freight transportation. In detail, we apply concepts of the cooperative game theory to identify among all allocation units specified by EN-16258 the most meaningful one. In doing so, we continue previous research projects 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 transport network. First, we complement the list of transport scenarios introduced by the prior research projects and present two novel transport scenarios. Second, we carry out a series of numerical experiments to compare the performance of the EN-16258 allocation rules with respect to accuracy, fairness, and the GHG minimizing incentive. Across all aspects, and taking the findings of the prior research projects into account, we conclude that the distance-based allocation rule is the most meaningful one.