Professor Alan McKinnon:

I thank the committee for inviting me to participate in this event. I am a freight specialist and my comments will relate to freight and logistics. There is general agreement that freight transport will be a difficult sector to abate in carbon terms, partly because of its heavy dependence on fossil fuel but also because of the forecast growth rates for freight traffic. On that point, however, Ireland is to some extent an exception because its freight traffic growth has been relatively slow. Ireland has still not got back to the level of freight activity it had in 2007. Indeed, the trend in Ireland's freight traffic growth has decoupled from the growth of its economy, which many countries are aspiring to achieve. Nonetheless, one should not be complacent because it will still be a challenge for Ireland to meet its carbon targets for 2030 as they relate to the freight sector.

I note that the committee uses the avoid-shift-improve, ASI, framework in its work. In my work on freight transport, I like to divide the improve category in three, looking at asset utilisation, energy efficiency and switching to lower-carbon energy sources. I would like to examine the five sets of measures. On the avoid option, we can try to restrainthe growth of freight traffic. This takes us a bit beyond the transport realm into sustainable consumption, which includes the circular economy, minimising waste and so forth, just to reduce the amount of stuff we have to transport. We can digitise more physical goods. We could also reverse some of the logistics trends that have driven freight traffic growth over the past few decades, moving back to more decentralised logistics or sourcing more products locally. These measures, it seems, have a fairly high carbon mitigation cost.

The second aspect is modal shift. I believe I am correct in saying that Ireland has the most road-dependent economy in Europe in terms of freight. The railways account for about 0.5% of its total freight transport. If it were to make a shift with freight, it would be starting from a very low base. Perhaps, however, we should broaden the definition of modal shift. In an urban area, for example, we can think about getting freight out of vans into cargo cycles, thus moving to non-motorised modes of freight transport that would help. We could consider more coastal shipping of freight.

The third set of initiatives relates to asset utilisation. I have looked at the figures, which show that Ireland's percentage of trucks running empty is significantly above the EU average. There is potential for filling vehicles more effectively. Current developments in digitalisation in this regard will help, including the use of online platforms to help companies to find backloads for their vehicles. It would also help if we could encourage companies to share their logistics assets through the process of supply-chain collaboration. Maybe even more radical measures, such as relaxing the just-in-time principle, could be considered. This principle gets blamed for much of the under-loading of vehicles.

The fourth category of measures includes improving energy efficiency. Ireland, like all EU countries, will benefit from the imposition of fuel economy standards for trucks, which will see the carbon intensity of new trucks reducing by 15% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. That, however, is a longer-term development. There are things we can do in the meantime to improve the energy efficiency of trucking, such as training drivers to drive their vehicles more fuel-efficiently. I am aware that this was the subject of a recent Irish Government study.

My final category of initiates involves shifting to lower-carbon forms of energy in the freight sector. My preference in this regard is for electrifying as much as possible and then taking advantage of the decarbonisation of electricity. Ireland's electricity had relatively high carbon intensity but the rate has been dropping quite steeply in recent years. Electrification will be very easily done in urban areas for local deliveries. The decarbonisation of vans by using electricity is already well under way. It is going to be a tougher challenge for long-haul road freight. There is a debate at the moment as to whether this should be achieved by batteries, hydrogen or electrifying the highways. It seems that for a country the size of Ireland, where the average length of haul for freight is only 60 km or 70 km, the best approach would be to use batteries to decarbonise. The good news is that we can use a range of technologies to decarbonise freight. If they are applied in combination in a time-phased way, it will help Ireland to meet its carbon-reduction targets by 2030.