The Rebound Effect in Road Freight Transport

In recent decades the promotion of energy efficiency improvements has become one of the key tools to try to attain reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change and energy policies have made efforts toward implementing energy efficiency regulation and standards in energy-intensive sectors such as road freight transport. However, energy efficiency improvements may lead to changes in the demand for energy services that offset some of the energy savings, in the form of rebound effects. Accordingly, the effect of energy efficiency to achieve energy and environmental objectives can be overestimated. This may provoke making ineffective public decisions to tackle environmental and energy policy issues. This chapter briefly describes the concept of the rebound effect and some matters related to its definition and measurement. It also summarizes the main results from the scarce literature on the rebound effect in road freight transport. Some policy aspects are also discussed.