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IRU welcomes the Council’s agreement on a well-to-wheel approach for counting emissions in the transport sector. Major points of unclarity remain on how to treat subcontracting, a common practice in road transport, and how much bureaucracy and costs the new calculations will place on transport operators.
The CountEmissions EU proposal was presented by the European Commission earlier this year as part of the “Greening Freight Package”. The new regulation aims to implement a common EU framework for calculating and disclosing GHG emissions deriving from passenger and goods transport services.
On a positive note, the Council has backed the Commission’s approach and aligned the CountEmissions EU proposal with ISO standard 14083. The ISO standard is already in use and provides a methodology for calculating and disclosing GHG emissions using a well-to-wheel approach.
A big novelty compared to the European Commission’s proposal is that the Council would like large transport operators to be obliged to count their emissions for domestic operations based on primary data.
IRU Director of EU Advocacy Raluca Marian said, “We take note that the Council would like large transport operators to calculate their emissions based on their actual fleets and operations. This is neither good nor bad in itself since large corporations have to report their emissions under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The issue is that the Council is unclear on what constitutes a large enterprise. A reference to the definitions used in the CSRD would have been appreciated. Consistency of EU rules would be a good start.”
The Council also binds the European Commission to provide an online tool to calculate GHG emissions.
One of the major points of uncertainty for the sector is the treatment of subcontractors. As a large proportion of the road transport market is characterised by subcontracting, it is important to clarify that a large company which bases its reporting on primary data is allowed to use default (secondary) data for small subcontractors. In most cases, small subcontractors are microenterprises (one to five vehicles), which do not possess the necessary expertise or tools to collect data as well as to calculate and disclose their GHG emissions. Read more
Source: IRU
