Paris Perspective #34: Turning supply chains green in a time of crisis - Reuben Fisher

This edition of Paris Perspective looks at what France needs to do to achieve its carbon-neutral goals by 2050. Is it possible to decarbonise the country's supply chains from A to Z, while facing ever more challenging economic and logistic hurdles?  

Remember the global rush to buy toilet paper?

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fragility of the world's supply chains was laid bare as supermarket shelves emptied and governments struggled to allay consumer fears that the system was broken.

Just over two years later, the world is facing the worst energy and inflation crisis in a generation, with a war in Europe and the threat of nuclear conflict.

The pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have helped underline the importance of decarbonising the way goods are transported.

The Shift Project

Reuben Fisher is Freight Project Manager with The Shift Project think-tank, and co-authour of a recent report entitled “Securing freight in a finite world.” 

Since 1960, freight traffic in France has tripled. Road freight accounts for 90 percent of the market and 95 percent of that is powered by fossil fuels.

When Fisher set out in 2020 to define the challenges ahead, the concept of transporting more goods with a limited amount of energy was not top of the agenda. But that has changed.

"When we were working on this aspect of the report in 2020, limited energy wasn't the most immediate factor.

"Now, it's become a crucial concern," Fisher explains, "fossil fuel for our vehicles is subsidised at a rate of almost 25 percent of the cost."

2022 droughts and waterways

2022 has been indelibly marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent choking of the world's largest supply of grain. That sparked a global food crisis. Russian gas supplies to Europe have been cut off, sanctions against Moscow are having a negative impact on Western economies and inflation has hit a record high. 

2022 has also been one of the hottest on record. In France, drought provoked by a succession of extreme heatwaves devastated crops and massively impacted the country's waterways.

Barges were able to load only a fraction of normal tonnage because water levels in canals and navigable rivers were so low. Can inland water transportation be future-proofed as the summers get hotter, and the water levels lower?

As a short-term solution, Fisher believes "an operational answer is the maintenance of the waterways, ensuring that they don't fill up with mud so we can keep the water level as deep as necessary for the boats to get through." 

This year, when the barges couldn't take the goods on board, the road hauliers picked up the load, thus increasing the amount of freight on motorways, feeding into the cycle of congestion, pollution and environmental degradation. 

Paris Perspective #33: Global crises and the International Rescue Committee - David Miliband Paris Perspective #31: War, peace and the future of the global economy – Steve Killelea

'The last kilometre'

The Shift Project's report on securing freight in a finite world also proposes that urban deliveries should be fully electric within 5 years. Anyone living in an urban environment in France will have already noticed a dramatic increase in e-bike and e-cargo deliveries since Covid. The carbon neutralising of the so-called "last kilometre" – delivery to the end point – would seem to be well underway. 

"It's definitely gathering pace. But it's not the case everywhere," Fisher underlines. "Paris is probably ahead of the crowd.

"I'm not sure we're seeing the same things in all of the big cities throughout France. Paris has the objective of having zero diesel vehicles by 2024. So we're looking at just over a 12-month period. The transition that we're seeing in Paris, is probably an example for other cities to follow."

He says that although The Shift Project emphasises that all delivery vehicles should be electrified, "wherever possible, we should replace those vehicles by cargo banks."

These are intermediate logistics centres, from which bulk-shipped goods can be re-distributed by cycle courrier or collected by pedestrians.

However, their generalisation would require huge operational changes within the delivery chain, including infrastructure for people servicing the banks to be able to shower after work. 

Will that be done in the next five years? "Yes, in some places, but probably not in all of the big cities in France." 

The buck stops here

According to The Shift Project, if everything in their toolbox is utilised between now and 2050, energy consumption will be reduced by 80 percent and freight emissions by 96 percent. 

That is a mind-boggling reversal of the current trend.

However, when it comes to getting the private sector and governments to pick up those tools, one question hangs like a sword of Damocles over carbon transition initiatives – How much will it cost?

"My answer is going to seem extremely unprofessional, but I don't know," Fisher laughs. "The reason I don't know is that within the report, we worked with the physical constraints – which are basically energy and limited supply."

Although the cost of decarbonisation will be an issue, he says, it will be secondary.

"If the aim is to decarbonise and to ensure that we can maintain an enjoyable society with a limited amount of energy, then the question of how much it costs is probably not the main question."

It will need to be worked out and it will need to be budgeted.

To conclude, Fisher brings to the fore another, often overlooked, aspect of what decarbonising our supply chain will entail. 

"What will the impact of these transformations be on employment? Both in terms of who we need to train now in order to make sure that these changes can happen? Because some jobs are going to disappear."

Might it be the full electrification of France's motorways and vehicles that will put the biggest dent in the pockets of the public and private sectors who join the drive to be carbon-neutral by 2050? 

"It might be," says Fisher but it will most likely be the future human resources in a carbon-free world. 

"We didn't work on the quantification of the cost of training, for example. So, if we are saying that we're going to train the several million people who will work in the logistics centres, that could probably be a little bit pricey, too."

Watch full video here.

Written, produced and presented by David Coffey.

Recorded and edited by Erwan Rome and Vincent Pora.

Reuben Fisher is the Freight Project Manager with The Shift Project think-tank and co-author of the report “Securing freight in a finite world”. He is based in Aix-en-Provence.