Information and communication technologies, road freight transport, and environmental sustainability

Abstract

Despite progress in reducing air pollutants in several countries, freight transport continues to have undesirable effects on environmental quality, human health, and the economy. Road freight transport, in particular, is associated with various negative externalities, including environmental and health damages, and the overexploitation of non-renewable natural resources. This paper investigates how ICTs interact with road freight transport to affect environmental quality regarding reducing CO2 emissions. The empirical strategy is focused on the yearly dataset from 2002 to 2014 in 43 countries. Using the two-step GMM techniques, the findings suggest that ICTs can decrease road freight transport’s negative impacts on environmental sustainability. Besides, the interactions of mobile phone and fixed telephone technologies with road freight transport are more efficient in reducing pollution than using internet networks. This paper underlines the importance of using ICTs to dampen road freight transport’s negative effects on environmental sustainability.

Moving Toward Environmental Sustainability: ICTs, Freight Transport, and CO₂ Emissions

“…Several papers have examined the question of environmental sustainability in relation to CO2 emissions reductions. Some of them attempted to examine the links relating ICTs to environmental damages (Añón Higón et al 2017;Park et al 2018;Asongu et al 2019), supply chain management and logistics (Cucchiella and Koh 2012;Nilsson and Sternberg 2017;Oláh et al 2017;Molero et al 2019;Centobelli et al 2020aCentobelli et al , 2020b, and freight transport (Giannopoulos 2004;Ozcan and Apergis 2018;Tob-Ogua et al 2018;Centobelli et al 2020aCentobelli et al , 2020bChatti 2020).…”

“…In order to understand how ICTs influence environmental quality, we employ the two-step GMM methodology as proposed by Chatti (2020). The empirical choice is motivated by five reasons: (i) the number of groups (n=43) exceeds the time periods (t=13); (ii) the dependent variable (lnCO2liq) does not change, given that the coefficient of first lag variable is larger than 0.8; (iii) the empirical investigation considers an eventual endogeneity bias, using instruments and timeinvariant omitted variables; (iv) "inherent biases in the difference estimator are corrected with the system estimator" (Asongu 2018); and (v) given that the empirical strategy is based on panel dataset, differences across groups are considered in estimations.…”

“…Omri et al 2015). Therefore, freight transport is expected to be associated with negative environmental effects (Wang et al 2015;Saidi and Hammami 2017;Chatti 2020).…”

“…Despite the key role that can be played by ICTs in reducing CO2 emissions, few studies have investigated the links between ICTs, freight activity, and environment (Wang et al 2015;Chatti 2020;Centobelli et al 2020aCentobelli et al , 2020b. Few empirical papers explicitly show how ICTs reduce pollution where interacting with freight transport.…”

“…Few empirical papers explicitly show how ICTs reduce pollution where interacting with freight transport. The existing literature is focused in general on the identification of green practices and new technologies employed by industrial and service companies (Wang et al 2015), but fails to identify the most efficient new technologies that can significantly decrease the environmental damages (Centobelli et al 2020a(Centobelli et al , 2020bChatti 2020).…”