Identifying a Country’s Freight Transport-Intensive Economic Sectors and Their Logistics Emissions—Method Development and Exemplary Evaluation with Austria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper aims at identifying Austria’s economic sectors that emit the most GHG emissions in their transportation activities. The authors take a twofold approach. First, they analyze the statistical data to identify the transport-intensive economic sectors (top-emitters) with the assumption that the emission intensity of transportation is homogeneous among different sectors. Then, they search what percentage of an Austrian transport-intensive company's total emissions is attributable to logistics and if this share does differ between the transport-intensive economic sectors.

 

The topic is interesting and up-to-date. The papers contribution is a bit limited (country -oriented).

The paper requres revisions, as follows:

·        In the Introduction section please highlight more the place of this study in a broader context and highlight why it is important. Explain more the originality of your approach. Why you focus only on Austria? Are there other countries with similar industry/ transport structure?

·        The literature review is rather limited, as you mainly refer to the statistical data and web pages. Moreover there are missing references in several places!!! (Error! Reference source not found)

·        The methodology is very briefly justified. You mention that your methodology is aligned with  a study conducted in Switzerland. Why? Is the structure of industry and transport freight similar in both countries? Can this methodology be used in any country? Or there are some limitations? How the fact that you do include the freight traffic on the Danube influence your results?

·        Currently Section 2 and Section 3 have got an analogic structure, what is confusing for reader. Methodology and data should be presented in Section 2. The analysis of shall be in Section 3.  In section 3.1. you refer to methodology there is not even there! (Error! Reference source not found). You must structure better your methodology and justify it. For example present a graph/algorithm which summarizes your research procedure for both questions (RQ1 and RQ2). The link between both research questions shall be highlighted.

·        The discussion on the results is limited. You focus very strongly on the Austrian context. Please explain how your results might be relevant in broader context. Are your results/methodology universal, can other researchers/policy markers benefit from them?

·        The conclusion is very limited; please highlight originality of the findings, limitations (the description of them is now dispersed in Section 2 and Section3), and future research directions.

·        Please proofread the paper. They are minor spelling and formatting mistake (e.g., double comas).The whole paper loos like it has been written in hurry! Did you read your paper before submitting to the Journal?

·        Please reformat paper in accordance with the published guidelines. E.g. In the lines 177-178 there is written: “Error! Reference source not found..” and the same in the  lines 200-201  again. Line 246-248: “This section may be divided by subheadings. It should provide a concise and precise description of the experimental results, their interpretation, as well as the experimental conclusions that can be drawn”??

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for the constructive feedback and the opportunity to revise our manuscript “identifying Austria’s freight transport-intensive economic sectors and their logistics emissions” after the review.

With your expertise and thanks to your structured feedback, we were able to rethink and restructure the paper and could thus make significant refinements to it. We hope that we have systematically worked through all points of criticism. The paper has been completely revised by the entire research team, the methodology and figures have been updated and expanded, and, in addition, academic proofreading has been performed.

First, we are sorry for the quality of the submission in terms of references and formatting issues. The original work was written in a plain template. Unfortunately, we had some problems with our literature database in transferring it to the sustainability template. Again, we are sorry for not rigorously checking the details and correcting the mentioned aspects.

According to your comments concerning the methodology and the focus on Austria, we completely revised the present paper's research aim and process. The article has changed from a pure analysis of the Austrian transport sector to the development and presentation of a generic method for analyzing the transport sector of a country. Along with this, the importance and context of the study in the introduction as well as the selection of the Swiss study as a reference was revised and presented more clearly. The method presented is now discussed in chapter 2, methodology, and visualized by a process diagram that is more comprehensible to the reader. In chapter 3, the method is applied to Austria as an example and the results and limitations of the application are discussed. In line with these changes and your comments, we also updated the paper's title and the discussion and conclusion sections.

Thank you for your interest in our research, the time you spent reviewing our manuscript, and the valuable input to improve it. We look forward to meeting your expectations and hope the revised manuscript will suit the journal's requirements.

Yours faithfully,

The authors

Reviewer 2 Report

The work tries to replicate another one carried out in Switzerland (reference 20) applying the same methodology.

The work is really complicated for its reading and an easier and higher quality writing is necessary and recommendable. A flow chart or some kind of graphic would have been very useful at the beginning of the work to guide the readers about the different steps followed by the authors to obtain results. Section 2.1 should be rewritten with a better structure and explanations for the easiness of its reading.

Several relaxations are presented:

-          ‘Grouped Goods’, 19 ‘Unidentifiable goods’, and goods that cannot be assigned to any division were removed from the list.

-          The transportation of high-volume, low-density goods is considered neglected.

-          Regarding cargo types: “If no logical allocation could be found, the goods were allocated to the cargo type ‘average¨.

Can the authors justify that these relaxations do not affect the robustness of the results?

In the introduction (line 67) freight transport accounts 4-7% of world-wide GHG emissions [14]. However, and regarding the authors´ findings, this figure is 12.5%. To the authors´ opinion, is this result in line with similar studies carried out for instance in similar study in Switzerland?

In line “256” it´s said that the top ten companies with a turnover greater than 10,000 € were selected. Is it correct this amount of money? It seems to be a low quantity!

Limitations are a clear weakness of the paper. Try to strength them.

 

Line 444 says that according to reference [67], “In 2015, food-system emissions amounted to 18 Gt CO2 equivalent per year globally, presenting 34% of total GHG emissions”. However, in the presented work (See Table 1) the accumulative share for “Food products” accounts for 34.47%. Accumulative share means along the years 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020? Probably I haven´t understood properly these figures and I beg the authors an explanation to clarify my doubts whether this figure (34%) is obtained in one year or in four years.

Several shortcomings have been detected in the review:

It would be profitable that reference 20 could be consulted to assess how it was performed and the obtained results, but it´s in German language and the results are unknown for their comparison with the conducted work developed in Austria. Reference [20] has no date about the year the study was performed.

The aforementioned methodology called EcoTransIT emission calculation tool (line 141) is not referenced.

In general, paragraphs are really very long.

It seems the work was not properly revised before its submission and as a consequence: “Error! Reference source not found” may found several times; Link to Aurelia Database [33] doesn´t work.

As the authors recognized (line 346), “Due to the limited sample size and the limited number of years considered, it is hardly possible to draw significant conclusions about the historical development of the logistics emission share”. I suggest the authors to collect a more comprehensive database in order to get over this important drawback.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for the constructive feedback and the opportunity to revise our manuscript “identifying Austria’s freight transport-intensive economic sectors and their logistics emissions” after the review.

With your expertise and thanks to your structured feedback, we were able to rethink and restructure the paper and could thus make significant refinements to it. We hope that we have systematically worked through all points of criticism. The paper has been completely revised by the entire research team, the methodology and figures have been updated and expanded, and, in addition, academic proofreading has been performed.

First, we are sorry for the quality of the submission in terms of references and formatting issues. The original work was written in a plain template. Unfortunately, we had some problems with our literature database in transferring it to the sustainability template. Again, we are sorry for not rigorously checking the details and correcting the mentioned aspects.

According to your comments concerning the methodology and the focus on Austria, we completely revised the present paper's research aim and process. The article has changed from a pure analysis of the Austrian transport sector to the development and presentation of a generic method for analyzing the transport sector of a country. Along with this, the importance and context of the study in the introduction as well as the selection of the Swiss study as a reference was revised and presented more clearly. The method presented is now discussed in chapter 2, methodology, and visualized by a process diagram that is more comprehensible to the reader.

The relaxations you mention in your comments are now addressed in more detail in the text. We excluded the named group categories because they account for less than 4% of overall transport volume and thus do not influence the results. We added this to the paper. We account for high-volume, low-density goods in our methodology and point this out more clearly throughout the paper. The fallback to allocate goods to the cargo type ‘average’ is proposed by the EcoTransIT World methodology. The reference to the methodology was updated and has been placed closer to the first mention in the text.

The 12.5% you address in your comments describes the share of logistics emissions in the total emissions of the investigated companies. As discussed in the text, this share is slightly higher than reported in other references, which is arguable because we investigate transport-intensive companies.

Regarding the comment on the threshold of the companies' revenue in the Aurelia database, we concluded that the number is indeed correct. Generally, we considered the top 10 companies found for each of the NACE divisions. But, for some of those divisions, the search resulted in a very small number of companies. If this was the case and companies were found in the top 10 list of the division that reported a revenue lower than 10,000€, we excluded them from the analysis because we did not expect them to report sustainability issues.

The cumulative share in table 1 is solely used to identify the goods that account for 80% of Austria's transport volume and have no further meaning. To avoid future confusion, we have explained this, removed the column from the table in the full text, and referred to the full table in the supplementary materials.

All in all, we refined the text and split it up into smaller and more comprehensible paragraphs. The new structure of the text highlights the aim, the methodology, and the results more clearly.

Thank you for your interest in our research, the time you spent reviewing our manuscript, and the valuable input to improve it. We look forward to meeting your expectations and hope the revised manuscript will suit the journal's requirements.

Yours faithfully,

The authors

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript is researched on logistics emissions data, and the issues addressed and addressed are of sufficient importance, however, I think the manuscript needs some improvements before it can be formally published.

(1) The method/model/method proposed in the manuscript does not contribute significantly to the novelty and uniqueness of published methods

(2) The important findings/management insights from the analysis results are insufficient, and more specific examples are needed, and how these measures/means exert their influence.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for the constructive feedback and the opportunity to revise our manuscript “identifying Austria’s freight transport-intensive economic sectors and their logistics emissions” after the review.

With your expertise and thanks to your structured feedback, we were able to rethink and restructure the paper and could thus make significant refinements to it. We hope that we have systematically worked through all points of criticism. The paper has been completely revised by the entire research team, the methodology and figures have been updated and expanded, and, in addition, academic proofreading has been performed.

First, we are sorry for the quality of the submission in terms of references and formatting issues. The original work was written in a plain template. Unfortunately, we had some problems with our literature database in transferring it to the sustainability template. Again, we are sorry for not rigorously checking the details and correcting the mentioned aspects.

According to your comments concerning the methodology and the focus on Austria, we completely revised the present paper's research aim and process. The article has changed from a pure analysis of the Austrian transport sector to the development and presentation of a generic method for analyzing the transport sector of a country. The study's importance, novelty, and the context in the introduction were presented more clearly. The method presented is now discussed in chapter 2, methodology, and visualized by a process diagram that is more comprehensible to the reader.

The discussion and conclusion sections have been revised and further implications are now highlighted.

Thank you for your interest in our research, the time you spent reviewing our manuscript, and the valuable input to improve it. We look forward to meeting your expectations and hope the revised manuscript will suit the journal's requirements.

Yours faithfully,

The authors

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

 

I appreciate the time and effort you have put to improve the paper and to reply to my comments.

 

The revised version of the paper is significantly improved. The paper's research goal and the description of the methodology are now clearer and more coherent. I agree that now your approach is presented in more universal way (it has changed from a pure analysis of the Austrian transport sector to the development of a generic method for analyzing the transport sector of a country). I am satisfied with the changes which have been made, I believe that the revised paper is more comprehensible to the reader (including the rewritten title, abstract, discussion and conclusions). I recommend your paper for publishing.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors carried out a considerable review of the manuscript, improving its quality. I would like to congratulate the authors for incorporating Figure 1, which greatly clarifies the methodology followed throughout the article.

The language, structure, and style of English have been profoundly improved.

Just a little mistake was found in line 264 "Figure  2Error! Reference source not found". Change it in the final document you have to submit to the journal.