Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Carbon emissions from the transport sector, including international air and sea transport, account for about 14% of global emissions and 23% of energy-related emissions. According to the IPCC, without targeted measures, the sector’s emissions could double by 2050. Such a trend would be in strong contrast with the achievement of carbon neutrality between 2050 and 2070, which is assessed as a necessary condition to limit global warming to below 2°C and towards 1.5°C consistently with the Paris Climate Agreement objective (IPCC, 2018).
Freight national transport emissions represent about 40% of total transport sector emissions. However, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted by countries in the run-up to COP21 make little mention of any concrete action in this sector: according to the OECD’s International Transport Forum, “freight transport has been largely ignored” by the current contributions (ITF-OECD, 2018).
Moreover, the few references to freight transport decarbonisation in the current NDCs almost exclusively focus on the technological issues of the improvement of trucks and associated energy sources, thereby neglecting any complementary strategies on other important drivers of sectoral emissions such as the transformation of systems of production, consumption and trade, and the transformation of infrastructure and logistics operations.
The Paris Agreement requires each Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to submit a revision of its national contribution in 2020. In this context, this Issue Brief proposes a logical and coherent structure for the elaboration of a decarbonisation strategy designed around five main categories of strategies and a set of underlying socio-economic and technological determinants and transformations. Each of these categories is illustrated with key indicator data derived from the DDP research group’s work on the pathways to deep decarbonisation of the freight transport in France in 2050.