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Brussels’ emission-counting scheme impractical, says trade groups

[ March 11, 2024   //   ]

European forwarder’s group Clecat, the  European Shippers’ Council and the European Express Association have welcome a European plan for a common framework for calculating emissions but warn that they have serious concerns over its practicality and effectiveness.

They says that the CountEmissions EU initiative would enable transport operators to accurately calculate, monitor and compare their emissions and give customers an estimate of the carbon footprint for different transport and delivery options.

However, the compromise amendments negotiated ahead of the upcoming joint vote in the European Parliament’s TRAN and ENVI Committees on 4 March would increase  the  administrative burden and discourage companies from actually calculating their emission, the associations add.

In particularly, they are deeply concerned over the possible introduction of a life-cycle methodology to calculate and report GHG emission from transport, taking emissions from vehicle manufacturing, maintenance and end-of-life into account. They say that there should be a distinction between emissions from transport services (in the scope of CountEmissions EU) and the full carbon footprint of a company, which may include GHG emissions beyond the transport services.

While the well-to-wheel approach under the ISO 14083 standard reflects the current business practices of companies, there is currently no robust methodology to include emissions other than stemming from the provision of transport services. The Latter would take time, and delay even further the uptake of greenhouse gas calculation in transport.

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