SERC / Grantham Research Project Launched:
An investigation of the Carbon Footprint of the Retail Sector
27 September 2012
LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre and Grantham Research Institute have begun a new collaborative project exploring the environmental effects of town centre first planning, and its impact on retail sector carbon footprints.
Land use regulation policies shape the location and the size of retail sites in the UK. The justification for Town Centre First Policies (TCFP) when they were imposed in England in 1996 rested strongly on their supposed ability to facilitate ‘linked trips’ and a desire to retain access to shopping for poorer households without cars. The main supposed benefit, therefore was that TCFP was worthwhile because of environmental and distributional gains, i.e. town centre sites were the most “sustainable”. Based on the premise that town centres are the most accessible location for alternative (non-car) means of transport and reduce the need to travel, imposing TCFP was expected to reduce the carbon footprint of the retail sector and help make the distribution of real incomes fairer.
In on-going work, Professor Paul Cheshire SERC and LSE Geography and Dr Christian Hilber (SERC and LSE Geography) are researching the implications of TCFP on the cost side, specifically, on the productivity of the retail sector The findings of this research suggest that both TCFP and more restrictive local application of planning policies impose substantial costs in terms of foregone output on the retail sector. This new SERC/Grantham project with Dr Rosa Sanchis-Guarner (SERC and Grantham) follows up by focusing on the claimed benefits of TCFP and rigorously evaluating them. The project aims to test if TCFP does in fact reduce the overall carbon footprint of retail. While TCFPs may facilitate ‘linked trips’ and make shopping trips without cars easier (the claimed benefits), there are a number of reasons to suspect that the overall carbon footprint effect of TCFP may be negative – the claimed benefits may be, in other words, another cost.
First, even if TCFP has encouraged some substitution towards public transport, most consumers still use private cars to go shopping (according to the National Travel Survey, in 2010 around 65% of shopping trips in GB were done by car/van, 22% by foot and only 10% of shopping trips were done by local bus or rail). Second, given that population has continued to decentralise, shopping patterns could have been adversely affected if retail is forced to locate in town centres while consumers increasingly live out of town. Average shopping trips might have been made longer and almost certainly diverted to more congested conditions. More frequent and longer trips by car to congested town centres can have potential adverse effects on carbon emissions associated with shopping trips. Carbon emissions and other toxic gases can also have harmful effects on population health outcomes. Third, on the logistics side, while there are no potential offsetting gains from the increased use of public transport, access for deliveries will almost certainly have been made more congested, lorry sizes reduced and distances from distribution depots on the outskirts of towns accessible to the motorway network, increased. Moreover, more expensive space and smaller shop sizes reduces storage space within shops, increasing the frequency of deliveries. Finally, previous research has shown that one impact of TCFP was to reduce the rate of retail development and this is reflected in an aging retail estate. Older buildings are less energy efficient.
Overall, therefore, the likely effects of TCFP on sustainability are unclear. The research of this project, using various datasets on shopping patterns, gas emissions and store energy use, aims to evaluate the effect of land use planning policies on the carbon footprint, emissions and energy use in the retail sector. Additionally, it also aims to analyse the effect of carbon emissions stemming from the retail sector on air pollution and population health outcomes. Finally, the carbon footprint effects of the emergence of internet shopping and how this affects traditional shopping trips (and their carbon footprint) would also be explored.
The methodology aims to estimate causal effects, including the precise role of different land use policies on the carbon footprint of the retail sector. Subject to data availability we also aim to explore the related distributional effects of TCFP as well as potential substitution effects: consumers may choose to shop online to avoid congested and inconvenient shopping trips by public transport or foot to town centre retailers.
For more details contact Dr Rosa Sanchis-Guarner.