Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (1/4)

Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 1 of

Offsetting Nature? Habitat Banking and Biodiversity Offsets in the English Land Use Planning System

Land use planning is a key arena for the spectacles of localism and marketisation being staged by our self-proclaimed greenest government ever. A new “presumption in favour of sustainable development” aims to encourage housebuilding and other development by simplifying and decentralising the planning system, while protecting the natural environment. This protection is in part to be achieved through a new market in off-site mitigation, supplementing existing policies which (can) require onsite mitigation of habitat degradation. The proposed system allows developers to offset deleterious impacts on biodiversity in one place by paying for improvements somewhere else, at a market rate. The message is that this “habitat banking” system will not only aggregate small habitats into ecologically significant reserves, while facilitating the ‘development’ we allegedly need to escape financial crisis, but also open up new income streams for landowners and reserve managers to spend on habitat conservation. By moving mitigation somewhere else, however, it will also reinforce the message that humans and other species live in separate places, that the non-human is not present in everyday life, but inhabits a separate world, which is fragile and in need of protection. This paper argues that displacing and marketising the mitigation of habitat degradation may serve to entrench this separation, thus retarding rather than facilitating the emergence of ecologically sustainable human settlements. It examines the use of habitat banking and biodiversity offsetting in the English planning system, and situates this in an international context, before offering some brief reflections on its likely effects and broader implications

Chapter 1 EU’s perspective on the functioning of giant online platforms in the digital economy

In the study, the EU’s digital market in light of the new regulation issued by the European Commission: the Digital Market Act has been examined. It will allow regulation of a significant part of the EU digital market activities of giant tech companies to the extent that they will be much more complex and restrictive in comparison to the creation of the traditional internal market in the early 1990s. In view of recent changes occurring in the digital market, including the increased expansion of the biggest companies and problems related to competition, the aim of this study is to capture the change in approach of the EU competition policy to entities, so-called gatekeepers, who offer core online platform services as compared to the existing solutions functioning in the traditional European Single Market

Impact and process assessment of the seven CITYLAB implementations

CITYLAB focuses on four axes that call for improvement and intervention: •Highly fragmented last-mile deliveries in city centres •Inefficient deliveries to large freight attractors and public administrations •Urban waste, return trips and recycling •Logistics sprawl Within these axes, the project supports seven implementations that are being tested, evaluated and rolled out. An implementation is defined as the process of preparing, testing and putting into practice a new service or a new way of operating or organising logistics activities. The objective of this report is to present an assessment of the effects and consequences of the implementations as they are conducted. For each case, we summarise the process leading to the application of a specific technical and managerial solution, and present the outcomes. For each implementation, we present •Problem and aim •Description of the solution •Implementation process •Effects and consequences •Challenges ahead •Lessons and generalisation of results This deliverable provides a complete picture of the evolvement of the implementations during the CITYLAB project and final versions of the process and impact assessment

'I See Something You Don't See'. A Computational Analysis of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act

none4siIn its latest proposals, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Commission puts forward several new obligations for online intermediaries, especially large online platforms and “gatekeepers.” Both are expected to serve as a blueprint for regulation in the United States, where lawmakers have also been investigating competition on digital platforms and new antitrust laws passed the House Judiciary Committee as of June 11, 2021. This Article investigates whether all stakeholder groups share the same understanding and use of the relevant terms and concepts of the DSA and DMA. Leveraging the power of computational text analysis, we find significant differences in the employment of terms like “gatekeepers,” “self-preferencing,” “collusion,” and others in the position papers of the consultation process that informed the drafting of the two latest Commission proposals. Added to that, sentiment analysis shows that in some cases these differences also come with dissimilar attitudes. While this may not be surprising for new concepts such as gatekeepers or self-preferencing, the same is not true for other terms, like “self-regulatory,” which not only is used differently by stakeholders but is also viewed more favorably by medium and big companies and organizations than by small ones. We conclude by sketching out how different computational text analysis tools, could be combined to provide many helpful insights for both rulemakers and legal scholars.Di Porto, Fabiana; Grote, Tatjana; Volpi, Gabriele; Invernizzi, RiccardoDi Porto, Fabiana; Grote, Tatjana; Volpi, Gabriele; Invernizzi, Riccard