Drone deliveries may improve local air quality, reduce congestion, reduce GHG emissions and enhance attractiveness of the cities. Drone deliveries have also the potential to boost local business.

Drone deliveries are directly connected with solutions such as Electified urban freight delivery/Last mile delivery, Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (C-ITS), Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM), Route optimisation, Last Mile Delivery, and other smart solutions.

Climate, environment and geography:

Ensuring that birds and insects are not affected by the service operations; Ensuring that the level, duration and frequency of noise from the operations is kept at acceptable level

Technical aspects/infrastructure:

Clarification of the integration of the airspace; taking into account and preparing for cyber security risks; Identifying the need for drone charging stations and/or drone ports

Policy and regulatory/legal framework:

Ensuring coordinated actions between all authority levels (EU, National, local) as well as smooth coordination between goods and logistics suppliers; Definition of quiet zones and times

Funding and financing:

Encouraging through different funding opportunities demonstration and pilot projects to show that the operations work

Project governance and implementation modalities:

Supporting the deployment with timely, sufficient and transparent information and dialogue with citizens and stakeholders.

Climate, environment and geography:

The risk of collision with other drones or manned aircraft and crashes due to malfunctioning navigation or bad weather conditions

Urban form and layout:

Privacy concerns relating to a drone’s ability to record and transmit data in real time (EASA, 2015). Data generated and stored during flight and delivery could be associated with specific individuals and reveal sensitive details of private properties and public buildings

Technical aspects/infrastructure:

Availability and location of recharging stations; Battery range limitations; Vehicle landing challenges; Vehicle routing challenges (to avoid empty flights and collisions); Charging process and recharging; Capabilities of urban aerospace to deal with high delivery drone traffic densities; Air safety; International hacking and cyber-attacks; Bad weather conditions; Limited carrying capacity 

Policy and regulatory/legal framework:

Commercial drone delivery has not been broadly legalized; Insurance obligations

Economic and social context:

High operational costs of the delivery systems; Job losses in traditional logistics; Affordability of the services for a large part of society; The risk to the use of delivery drones for illicit purposes, such as smuggling, transport of drugs or weapons, or even terrorist attacks.

Climate, environment and geography:

The threat to wildlife, especially birds, is a key concern; The noise generated by the vehicles when they take-off, land and in flight; Visual pollution; CO2 emissions relating to battery production and use and extra warehousing, required by a drone-based logistics system, may reduce or eliminate the benefits

Policy and regulatory/legal framework:

Ethical issues due to the use of algorithms. Autonomous drones might need to ‘make’ an ethical decision in situations where harm cannot be prevented because of an incident, such as where to crash, who to injure and what damage to cause

Economic and social context:

High operational costs of the delivery systems; Job losses in traditional logistics; Affordability of the services for a large part of society; The risk to the use of delivery drones for illicit purposes, such as smuggling, transport of drugs or weapons, or even terrorist attacks.

• Benarbia, T.; Kyamakya, K. A Literature Review of Drone-Based Package Delivery Logistics Systems and Their Implementation Feasibility. Sustainability 2022, 14, 360.
• EASA: Study on the societal acceptance of Urban Air Mobility in Europe
• New mode for transporting pharmacy products by drone trialled in Helsinki | Mobility Innovation Marketplace (eiturbanmobility.eu)

Reduction of CO2 emissions compared to traditional vehicles (trucks, vans), [g/tonne km]

DNSH

It is still unclear whether drone delivery will simply replace alternative delivery methods or lead to additional delivery trips and increase in GHG emissions. This also highly depends on the type of goods being delivered by drones, the way they would have been delivered in a Business-as-usual scenario, and the existing land-use and transport patterns in which the drones are being used (rural vs. Urban environment).

The threat to wildlife, especially birds, is a key concern.

EU level regulation for commercial drone deliveries, Regulation on quiet zones and times.

For example: EU REGULATION 2019/947 of 24 May 2019 on the rules and procedures for the operation of unmanned aircraft.

Several comparative studies (Figliozzi, 2017; Goldchild and Toy, 2017; Park et al., 2018; Stolaroff et al., 2018) show that delivery drones are more ‘CO2-efficient’ than conventional means of transport, with the amount of CO2 emissions being greatly reduced, but this depends on a number of specific factors. In short, these studies show that delivery drones can perform better than:

• Conventional delivery trucks, as they produce considerably less CO2 emissions when the distance travelled is short, energy requirements are low and number of recipients is small (Goldchild and Toy, 2017);
• Diesel vans, with significantly better results when the payloads are small and customers are clustered around one delivery route (Figliozzi, 2017);
• Motorcycles, with higher CO2 efficiency achieved in rural than in urban environments (Park et al., 2018).

These results should, however, be viewed with caution. They focus on a narrow market, i.e. last-mile delivery to a single or few recipients with low payload.

Goldchild, A. and Toy, J., 2017, ‘Delivery by drone: an evaluation of unmanned aerial vehicle technology in reducing CO2 emissions in the delivery service industry’, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment61, pp. 58-67

Figliozzi, M. A., 2017, ‘Lifecycle modeling and assessment of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) CO2e emissions’, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 57, pp. 251-261.

Park, J., et al., 2018, ‘A comparative analysis of the environmental benefits of drone-based delivery services in urban and rural areas’, Sustainability10, p. 888.

EEA Briefing: Delivery drones and the environment