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Product Portfolio Based Decarbonization Strategies in the Automotive Industry

Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Climate change is one of the major challenges our society is currently facing. The automotive industry, which accounts for a significant proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, must play its part in mitigating climate change. Supplier companies within the automotive industry play an important role in the development and production of cars and are therefore crucial to the decarbonization of the industry. Although many suppliers have already started to set decarbonization targets and implement decarbonization activities, they are still struggling to develop and implement clear decarbonization strategies. Existing decarbonization strategies are usually based on a top-down calculation of a company’s emissions through carbon accounting with a limited level of detail and a lack of perspective on the company’s products. However, it is crucial for a company to understand in detail the impact of changing boundary conditions and its own decisions on the future global warming potential (GWP) of its product portfolio in order to develop consistent strategies. The main research objective of this thesis is therefore the development of a concept which, based on the bottom-up assessment of the product portfolio of a company, supports the decarbonization of the company under the consideration of changing boundary conditions and by displaying possible decarbonization strategies. First, the theoretical background in relation to the environmental assessment of products based on life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle engineering (LCE) as well as the structure of the automotive industry and its current progress in decarbonization is presented. The state of research is then assessed, focusing on three research fields: the assessment of environmental impacts of product portfolios, prospective LCA (pLCA), and target based LCE. Selected approaches from each research field are evaluated with regards to the research objective. The assessment reveals the need for a consistent concept for the development of decarbonization strategies within the automotive supplier industry. Based on the state of research, a corresponding concept is proposed. It is based on the structure of traditional strategy processes and consists of five modules: the analysis of the current situation (I), the strategic target setting (II), the prognosis of future developments (III), the strategy formulation and assessment (IV), and the strategy implementation (V). A special focus of this work lies on the Modules I, III and IV, as these modules include several new approaches with regard to the research gap. These are the assessment of the GWP of product portfolios based on LCA, the integration of future developments into this assessment based on pLCA, and the derivation of strategies for decarbonization. The applicability of the proposed concept is demonstrated by the exemplarily application to an automotive supplier's product portfolio. The results show that the concept provides additional insights regarding the key factors for decarbonization within (foreground system) and outside (background system) the company’s area of influence. In particular, the application shows that strategic changes within the company can lead to a decoupling from developments in the background system and are crucial for achieving decarbonization targets. All in all, by combining different research fields, the thesis provides a new and consistent concept for the development of decarbonization strategies based on a bottom-up assessment of an automotive supplier company’s product portfolio.
DOI: 10.24355/dbbs.084-202503041406-0
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6926240476
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