Big beauty players named global sustainable ‘giants’

A new study commissioned by the EEA shows a clear hierarchy of passenger and freight transport modes, in terms of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Rail and waterborne transport have the lowest emissions per kilometre and unit transported, while aviation and road transport emit significantly more. Alongside shifting to rail and waterborne transport, improving the GHG efficiency of all motorised forms of transport remains an important objective. Moreover, monitoring their GHG efficiency on a regular basis would support these efforts. While active modes, such as walking and cycling, are outside the scope of the study, they are an obvious choice for clean and sustainable mobility because their emissions can be assumed to be close to zero.

This report, produced in the framework of IEA Bioenergy Task 43 (biomass supply), provides a current Canadian perspective on how the sustainability of the…