A combination of sustainability strategies could slash emissions from delivering parcels from online orders in China by more than four-fifths, according to a new analysis. The study also finds the climate impact of these deliveries may be more than 9 times greater than previous studies have estimated.
The researchers tested two strategies to reduce so-called last-mile emissions – that is, the impact of final delivery of parcels to individual addresses. The first was simply replacing gasoline-powered delivery vehicles with electric ones. If implemented nationwide, they found it could save 18.2% of last-mile emissions. The EV switch would have the largest impact in smaller cities, reducing emissions by almost 30% there compared to about 7% in the largest cities.
The second strategy, however, was the real winner. Cooperation among logistics companies—which the Chinese government has been advocating since 2018—could dramatically slash emissions by avoiding having multiple couriers from different companies make deliveries to the same neighborhood. If all six major delivery companies cooperated in this way, it would reduce emissions by up to 66%.
The two strategies together could reduce last-mile emissions by as much as 84.2%.
The growth of e-commerce and surge in online orders in recent years has resulted in a massive expansion of delivery services. But the climate impact of last-mile delivery hasn’t been rigorously studied until now. Past studies have tended to be small-scale, rely on modeling or simulations, or capture only coarse-grained movements of delivery couriers, leading to underestimates of emissions.
In the new analysis, researchers leveraged data on 14 billion orders from the e-commerce platform JD.com and smartphone location data from 1.9 million couriers to calculate last-mile emissions for parcel delivery in 365 Chinese cities. The analysis is particularly important in China, which handles almost 60% of the world’s parcel volume, with more than 130 billion parcels delivered in 2023.
The researchers’ analysis shows that Chinese delivery couriers traveled more than 70 million miles per day in 2023 and generated 1.59 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Surprisingly, last-mile delivery emissions don’t increase linearly with orders. From January 2023 to January 2024, orders increased by 83.5%, but emissions only went up by 31.3%, representing a decline of about 28% in per-parcel emissions.
“This suggests that system-level efficiencies, such as better logistics, routing, and consolidation, can significantly offset the environmental impact of rapidly growing demand,” says study team member Zhiqing Hong, a computer scientist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Source: Hong Z. et al. “Decarbonizing emissions from last-mile deliveries in Chinese cities.” Nature Cities 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.
