The European Directive regulating sustainability reporting by companies, already in force in 2024, will lead to a further increase in transport bureaucracy. News published by Transporte XXI. SEE LINK
The growing regulatory pressure from European authorities on companies in the transport sector has experienced a new chapter with the entry into force, from the beginning of this year, of the European Directive 2022/2464 that regulates the presentation of information on sustainability.
The new regulation will generate a ‘significant burden of bureaucracy’ in the freight transport sector, according to the experts participating in the conference ‘The 2024 sustainability agenda in maritime transport and logistics’, organised by Deusto Business, in collaboration with the Vasco logistics group, last Friday in Madrid.
The new Directive establishes a common framework and raises the level of information on sustainability to put it on a par with financial information in companies.
The new Directive establishes a common framework and raises the level of sustainability reporting to put it on a par with financial reporting in companies.
The Directive establishes a common framework and raises the level of sustainability reporting to the same level as financial reporting in companies. It broadens the set of reporting obligations, introduces more detailed obligations on the environmental, human rights and social impacts of companies, based on mandatory European standards. Companies will be subject to independent audits and certification processes.
‘It’s crazy if we start adding up the number of regulations in place for companies,’ lamented CIE Automotive’s Director of Compliance and ESG, Susana Molinuevo. ‘The volume of requirements is such that the pressure is spectacular,’ she stressed.
The new European Directive has a new focus on how sustainability affects the company’s value creation process, explained Molinuevo. In this sense, the directive recalled that the supply chain represents 90 percent of the emissions of companies like hers, so it will be necessary to ‘establish collaborative actions with suppliers to improve’.
Molinuevo drew attention to the process of electrification, connected vehicles and driverless driving, pointing out that transport generates 10 per cent of polluting emissions, but that ‘new technologies also pollute, as they already represent 5 per cent of emissions and rising’.
Irresponsibility
Ramón Valdivia, executive vice-president of Astic, insisted on the fundamental role of road freight transport for Spanish foreign trade. ‘A vector that systematically does not fail them’, he stressed. Valdivia agreed that the bureaucratic burden that companies have to bear due to the enormous European regulation is ‘not only madness, but I also think it is irresponsible’.
For the executive vice-president of Astic, ‘we forget that sustainability is based on three pillars: environmental, social and economic’. In this line, ‘our way of life is not sustainable without transport and neither are the red numbers sustainable,’ he said. ‘Either we are financially sustainable or we have nothing to do,’ he warned.
Valdivia pointed out that Spain is in a key geostrategic position to be a major logistics power, but as a result of increasingly restrictive European regulations, ‘we run the risk of being overtaken by countries such as Morocco and Turkey because of everything we are doing’, he lamented.
For his part, Mikel Urrutia, general manager of Vasco Shipping Services, focused on the process of decarbonisation in maritime transport. Urrutia recalled that, with the new European regulations, shipping companies are obliged to pay for 40 percent of their emissions in 2024, 70 percent in 2025 and 100 percent in 2026. However, pending reciprocity from international bodies and other countries on this type of regulation, traffic outside Europe will reduce the payment to 50 per cent.
‘The EU assumes the role of leadership in matters of sustainability in transport, but has so far received no response from other countries, so this lack of globalisation is causing confusion in the maritime sector and could be a source of conflict,’ warned Urrutia. ‘There are well-intentioned measures that in the end can be detrimental,’ he insisted.
Intermodal transport
In turn, Mikel Lavin, general manager of Intermodal Forwarding, referred to the imminent modification of the Combined Transport Directive, ‘the only EU document for intermodal transport’. Lavin recalled the inefficiency of the previous directive, which has shown that what has been done so far at regulatory and financial level was not enough, in a context in which ‘the gap between road and rail is still very large’.
Lavin said he was in favour of boosting the flexibility of the intermodal chain in order to adapt road transport to the more rigid schedules of rail and maritime transport. In this sense, ‘it is necessary to focus more European aid on intermodal terminals, so that everything flows much better,’ he said. The executive gave as an example the railway traffic that has been set up and that, due to the cross-border problems of the railway, generates a transit time twice as long as that of the road. ‘It is not that the railway does not work, but that everything that surrounds it does not go along with it’, he stated.
News published by Transporte XXI. SEE LINK
