Beyond emission-centric freight planning: Integrating material intensity and climate impacts in corridor selection

Résumé fourni par la source

Freight corridor evaluation typically focuses on operational CO 2 -equivalent emissions (CO 2eq ), costs, and travel time, often neglecting the upstream resource intensity of infrastructure and vehicle systems. This oversight limits strategic planning amid growing climate and material pressures. This study presents a multi-criteria framework that combines donor-side resource accounting (emergy), climate assessment (CO 2eq ), financial costs, and travel time within a deterministic additive decision structure. The framework was applied to three multimodal export corridors linking Brazil and China, using both infrastructure-oriented (km-year) and cargo-oriented (km-ton) functional units. Findings show that structure-based and freight-based evaluations yield different sustainability rankings. In the cargo-oriented analysis, Corridor 1 had the lowest upstream resource demand at 7.77 × 10 11 sej/km-ton and an operating cost of 0.40 USD/km-ton. In contrast, Corridor 3 recorded the lowest CO 2 -equivalent emissions (0.54 kgCO 2 eq/km-ton) and the shortest travel time (42.69 days), indicating that no single corridor optimizes all sustainability criteria. Scenario analyses indicated that balanced freight allocation could reduce emergy demand to 2.34 × 10 12 sej/km-ton while achieving the top overall multi-criteria performance. These results underscore the need to incorporate upstream resource intensity into traditional transport metrics to enhance pre-emptive freight corridor planning. The proposed framework enriches conventional emission-focused assessments and offers a versatile decision-support model that can adapt to various commodities, regions, and infrastructure settings.

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