Objective
Factors like global competition, labour cost, recycling technologies and environmental restrictions force companies to implement new logistics and manufacturing systems. From a transport’s point-of-view most of these new systems (e.g. offshoring) have negative impacts as they induce additional freight transport. But on the other hand they are implemented as they have positive effects like cheaper production processes (e.g. due to economies of scale) or even environmental benefits (e.g. due to recycling).
The objective of this study is
- to give an insight into new logistics and manufacturing trends and
- their impacts on economic and environmental sustainability,
- to provide scenario based recommendations for European freight transport policy considering both economic and environmental sustainability and
- to improve existing tools (TRANSTOOLS, I-O tables) used for impact assessment and cost benefit analysis.
This will be done by analyzing status and trends of the external factors (world trade, policy & legislation, transport system, technology) and performing case studies in crucial economic sectors. These cases studies will analyze new best practices of logistics and manufacturing systems, when CO2 emissions are considered an important design criterion. These microeconomic results will be used to improve TRANSTOOLS and I-O tables.
Based on these results a scenario analysis will be done to estimate the possible impacts of these new best practices on European environmental (criteria: freight transport’s carbon footprint, products’ logistics and manufacturing carbon footprint) and economic (criterion: economic growth) sustainability. Storylines will be developed and their likeness, chances and risks estimated.
Finally transport policy’s costs and benefits will be assessed for the different scenarios. This will lead to recommendations for transport policy for reducing transport emissions without negative impacts on the other sustainability criteria.
Fields of science
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP7-SST-2008-TREN-1
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CSA-SA - Support actionsCoordinator
1020 Wien
Austria