Error parsing XSLT file: \xslt\FacebookOpenGraph.xslt Ashley Sowerby's blog: 11 March - How should we measure the impact of fleets?
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Ashley Sowerby's blog: 11 March - How should we measure the impact of fleets?

Date: 11 March 2016

It's become clear in the last few years that the staple measure used to measure the environmental impact of fleets - CO2 - is hopelessly inadequate on its own.

While we need to minimise the effects of global warming, we also need to have cleaner air in our cities, for example. With this in mind, measuring and addressing CO2 alone will not be sufficient.

This leads to two important but very complicated questions: how should we measure the environmental impact of fleets in the future and how should fleets be incentivised to make sure that we get the right results?

The second of these is probably more easily answered than the first. Taxation has been extraordinarily efficient in steering fleets towards nominally low-CO2 vehicles, even if the official figures for many cars have subsequently been found to be lacking. There is no reason to suspect that a similar approach won't work in the years to come.

However, the first question is a very complex one. Air quality has become a greater concern and the amount of NOx pollutants being emitted by vehicles is increasingly being cited as an important item to be addressed.

My worry is that NOx will be used as a blunt instrument in the same way as CO2 has been over the last decade or more, when we became used to assessing the entire environmental impact of a car in a single g/km figure.

It seems to me that what we need to do in the future is avoid knee-jerk reactions in favour of something subtler and more effective. Cars produce a whole range of different emissions with a whole range of different effects. Often, reducing one will have an impact on how much of another is produced.

To avoid similar mistakes to the past, both the fleet industry and the government as the regulating body need to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of emissions - beyond the kind that can be summarised in simplistic advertising headlines.



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