Quantification of Potential Ecological Impacts of Road Transport

Throughout the world land use and fragmentation are among the major causes of the de-struction of habitats and the resulting loss of biological diversity. Road use in general and road haulage in particular significantly and still increasingly evoke both causes. Largely due to biodiversity’s high complexity in meaning and morale and a missing societal inclination to assume responsibility for environmental impacts, an analysis of environmental management tools and corporate efforts found management practices in the field of transport often to be limited to the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Due to the ecological significance of other impacts, a superior, more complete management approach should contain the two major effects of land use, namely direct land use representing the sealing of soil and habitat degra-dation representing the impact on adjacent area, and the effect of landscape fragmentation. In the research at hand, four methods of user-discrete quantification that concern sealed ar-ea, degraded area, and landscape fragmentation, were developed. Objectives of the obtained methods are to stimulate the development of standardized indicators and immediately to facilitate the consideration and management of these impacts in corporate environmental management and strategic planning. Results allow companies to compare the impacts of alternative routes, vehicles and strategies of sourcing and delivery on a unit basis and at a point or over a course of time. As technical potential for the mitigation of the impacts is lim-ited, the work suggests changes in economic aspirations of continued material growth and recognition of simplicity and sufficiency as elements of a good life, which could stem from the realization of an amiable character of humans’ relations to contemporaries, future generations and non-human nature, as requisites in order deliberately to establish a gross national mobility intensity that does not surpass sustainable ecological boundaries. Nonetheless, the main contributions of the indicators are to provide knowledge to corporate staff and decision-makers and to facilitate the inclusion of the referred to impacts into envi-ronmental management. For the need of the pioneering indicators presented here to be chal-lenged and advanced, the work is also directed at practitioners working on environmental management tools and guidelines and researchers working in fields as diverse as biology or business economics. The dissertation consists of a main text and four appended articles. It is explained how the articles and their findings relate to the central theme of developing methods of quantification for the impacts of land use, habitat degradation and fragmentation