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Client pressure pushes forwarders into carbon-cutting

[ July 4, 2023   //   ]

Client pressure is driving decarbonisation as much as legislation, according to a member survey by the freight forwarding trade association, BIFA

The survey was conducted in association with BIFA’s partner, the Pledge decarbonisation software platform for transport and logistics, to evaluate the importance of the issue.

It found that there is growing awareness of measuring carbon emissions from the shipment of freight amongst BIFA members with 69% of respondents saying that emissions was playing some sort of role within their day-to-day activities, whilst for 15.5% it was deeply rooted in their business activities.

But BIFA says that while the perceived wisdom has always been that regulation would drive change, for almost 30% of members, client pressure is the main contributor, while internal initiatives accounted for a further 31%.

BIFA’s believes that the use of IT systems to facilitate the integration of transport management with carbon calculation systems is key to recording and reporting and is the first step to considering how to reduce them via modal shift and, where that is not practical, via measures such as carbon offsetting.

The survey found also that while 22.6% of respondents had an annual budget of less than £1,000 to spend on carbon emissions calculation, 31% had between £1,000 and £9,000 to spend while the budgets of a further 14% exceeded £20,000.

BIFA director general, Steve Parker commented: “The conclusion of the survey is that there has been growing awareness of environmental issues amongst the BIFA membership and, to some extent, a growing awareness of the need to measure carbon emissions and provide that information to clients.

“It will be particularly challenging for SMEs to determine how they will use this data and what they can actually do to reduce their carbon emissions – the general consensus is that significant changes will be required. Although what these will be are not clear at the moment.”

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