External Costs
Environmental Impacts of Freight transport
Author: Walter Vassallo, Head Transport Economiocs and Logistics
External impacts include environmental impacts and are defined as those
impacts that are a consequence of operations inherent to cargo transport
i.e. when travelling at cruising speed and during manoeuvring and
stationary operations.
The main environmental impacts of transports are: Emissions to air, Water
pollution,Hazardous material carriage, Noise pollution. External impacts
include: Congestion, Accidents, and Land use.
It can be stated that no mode of surface transport is ‘environmentally
friendly’. All have environmental (and external) impacts.
Walter Vassallo,
AMRIE
To provide a 'level playing field' across the various
transport modes, it is imperative to identify and cost
the many elements – including the external costs entering into multi-modal and uni-modal logistic
supply chains. Only then will it be possible to achieve
an unbiased multi-modal pricing structure providing
genuine modal choice between the links in the logistics
transport chains, applicable to specific goods to be
transported between production and distribution points
across Europe.
Over the past years several initiatives and studies have been taken leading
towards, mainly, the restriction of emissions to air from motor vehicles. The
control of emissions from motor vehicles has been the target of several
European directives, which led towards reduced emission values. As a
consequence, the environmental performance on air emissions of road
transport has been improving constantly whereas the maritime transport
sector in general has undergone less environmental progress on air
emissions.
Currently there is no consensus on the overall comparative environmental
impacts of the various surface transport modes. It is therefore necessary to
establish an acceptable methodology on a corridor/segment basis for
evaluating the qualitative and monetary values associated with the
environmental impacts across transport modes. This will facilitate intermodal/multi-modal comparisons and consequent internalization of the
external costs.
A recent European Project REALISE (www.realise-sss.org), co-ordinated
by AMRIE, developed a robust bottom-up methodology and an accounting
framework which performs environmental impact calculations (both in
qualitative and monetary terms) for any given origin-destination
relationship and for any given transport mode. As categories of external
impacts of transport, the tool distinguishes between: local air pollution,
global warming, noise pollution, accidents and congestion.
The corridor-based approach of REALISE in respect of the Intermodal
Comparative Environmental Framework should be accepted as the basis for
further EU policy development concerned with improving the environmental
performance of the freight carriage transport networks in Europe.
Results show that the weak point of Short Sea Shipping (SSS) in terms of
environmental costs is related to the emissions to air especially SO 2
(Sulphur Dioxide), NOx (Nitrogen Oxides) and PM (Particulates), which are
intrinsically related to the fuel type used and on which the other transport
modes promise to improve more rapidly than SSS. Moreover, all three
pollutants are rated as the most damaging pollutants of transport to society.
To respond to this trend, SSS transport ought to improve its environmental
performance as well. Either through improved SSS-specific combustion
techniques or altered fuel characteristics.
Autonomous technological progress is one way, regulation of used
technologies and fuel another one. In addition, targets proclaimed by the
proper SSS community regarding Environmental Impacts are a third way to
cope with SSS’ relative as well as absolute environmental performance.
On the concrete level of corridors all exercises show that under normal
circumstances short sea shipping performs better than any other transport
mode in all categories of externalities, except for emission of SO2 and S
(Sulphur), where road performs better.
In the future, however, if one takes into account the assumptions made
regarding road transport conformance, at fleet level, with the proposed Euro
5 regulations, the relative position of SSS worsens. In this scenario the road
option improves its comparative emission performance more sharply than
SSS does. This will lead to a situation in which SSS not only emits more SO 2
and S per 1000 TEUkm, but also more PM, than road transport. The costs of
the latter pollutant per emitted gramme is considerable.
The results also show that multimodal options involving one or more railway
legs, perform less well. This is due to the high noise cost associated with
railway transport. The longer the total length of the route that is covered by
rail, the higher the aggregated cost of noise inherent to the multimodal
option.
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Two aspects are difficult to analyse satisfactorily at corridor level: air
emissions (except CO2 - Carbon Dioxide) and congestion. The impacts of
both factors are substantially localized, i.e. concentrated in their impact
around urban areas (in the case of SSS specifically around port cities). It
would be possible, but not necessarily formally correct, to linearise the
totality of the localized impacts along corridors. Formally, the ideal
methodology would be to provide a GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
mapping of the impacts and have a charging system that reflected the
distribution pattern in space and time. This would, however, almost
certainly be too complex to establish and administer.
The overall main results indicate that - with the exception of certain
emissions to air - short sea shipping appears as the transport mode having
the lowest overall environmental and external impacts. Providing the air
emissions problem is addressed over the next decade this position of short
sea shipping may be regarded as assured. Hence, any process of
internalizing external costs would see SSS as the preferred mode in cost
and price terms.
Legend:
SSS – Short Sea Shipping
GIS- Geographic Information Systems
TEU - Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit
S - Sulphur
SO2 - Sulphur Dioxide
NOx - Nitrogen Oxides
CO2 - Carbon Dioxide
PM - Particulates
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