Sustainable Urban Mobility Pathways

Policies, Institutions, and Coalitions for Low Carbon Transportation in Emerging Countries

Oliver Lah

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128148983
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Sustainable Urban Mobility Pathways examines how sustainable urban mobility solutions contribute to achieving worldwide sustainable development and global climate change targets, while also identifying barriers to implementation and strategies to overcome them. Building on city-to-city cooperation experiences in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, the book examines key challenges in the context of the Paris Agreement, UN Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, including policies needed to achieve a sustainable, low-carbon pathway for transport and how an integrated policy strategy is designed to provide a basis for political coalitions.

The book explores which institutional framework creates sufficient political stability and continuity to foster the take-up of and long-term support for sustainable transport strategies. The linkages of climate change and wider sustainable development objectives are covered, including success stories, best practices, and quantitative analysis for key emerging economies in public transport, walking, cycling, freight and logistics, vehicle technology and fuels, urban planning and integration, and national framework policies.

• Provides a holistic view of sustainable urban transport, focusing on policy-making processes, the role of institutions and successes and pitfalls
• Delivers practical insights drawn from the experiences of actual city-to-city cooperation and on-the-ground policy work
• Explores options for the integration of policy objectives and institutional structures that form coalitions for the implementation of sustainable urban mobility solutions
• Describes the policy, institutional, political, and socio-economic aspects in cities in five emerging economies: Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey

Chapter 1

Trends, Drivers, and Pathways for Sustainable Urban Mobility

Oliver Lah^1,2, ¹Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Berlin, Germany, ²Climate Action Implementation Facility (CAIF), Berlin, Germany

Abstract

Transport plays a key role in delivering on the Paris Agreement, the sustainable development goals, and the New Urban Agenda. While providing essential services to society and economy, transport is also an important part of the economy and it is at the core of a number of major sustainability challenges, in particular climate change, air quality, safety, energy security, and efficiency in the use of resources. This book identifies the linkages between decarbonization pathways, policy design, coalition building, and institutional frameworks. The analysis shows that there are critical interlinkages between these aspects:

• • Decarbonization of the transport sector is not possible through isolated measures. A broad range of local and national actions are needed to bring the sectors on to a low-carbon development path.
• • A holistic policy approach is needed to deliver on wider sustainable development objectives. Addressing a broader range of policy objectives can help forming coalitions and consensus among key political and societal actors.
• • Consensus-oriented institutions are needed to maintain a stable policy environment that enables the long-term transitions towards a low-carbon development path.

Keywords

Decarbonisation; transport policy; governance; integration

Outline

• Introduction 1
• Trends, Drivers, and Pathways 2
• Potential for Cobenefits 5
• Coalitions and Institutions 9
• Toward an Integrated Policy and Governance Framework for the Decarbonization of the Transport Sector 13
• References 18
• Further Reading 22

Introduction

Transport is a highly complex sector and policy interventions in this sector can have unintended consequences, positive and negative, as they rarely only affect one objective, for example, air quality measures may affect fuel efficiency negatively or biofuels may have land-use change implications. Linking and packaging policies is therefore vital to generate synergies and cobenefits between measures. This provides a basis for coalitions that can align different veto players. While some analysis on policy integration has been carried out, e.g., Justen et al. (2014) and Givoni (2014), the linkages between policy packaging, cobenefits, and coalitions can be summarized in three aspects:

• Trends, drivers and pathways: What are the key trends and drivers in the transport sector, what is the greenhouse gas emission reduction potential, and how can mitigation pathways contribute to sustainable development as a lever for broad coalitions?
• Potential for cobenefits: What policies are needed to achieve a sustainable, low-carbon pathway for transport, what barriers have to be overcome and how would an integrated policy strategy need to be designed to provide a basis for political coalitions?
• Coalitions and institutions: What institutional framework creates sufficient political stability and continuity to foster the take-up of and long-term support for sustainable transport strategies?

Trends, Drivers, and Pathways

Scenarios can play an important role in climate change relevant assessment, they can guide and inform policy decisions, and provide indications of potential impacts of actions or the lack thereof (van Vuuren et al., 2012). The policy relevance of scenarios can vary greatly, which heavily depends on the design of the analysis, the assumptions, context, and presentation of the scenarios (Garb et al., 2008). Moving from abstract scenarios to concrete cases in a specific area can make quantitative research policy relevant and can guide the development and implementation of policy (Elmore, 1979). Hence, not only the data and analysis are relevant for the development of decarbonization scenarios, but also the framing and the presentation considerably affect the policy relevant to the scenarios and pathways derived from them (Berkhout et al., 2002). This is where this book aims to make a contribution to the current body of literature, by identifying policy drivers in key emerging economies and developing policy-relevant scenarios that highlight the different policy options to decarbonize the transport sector and their interactions.

The transport sector is currently on track to continue to stay at current levels of greenhouse gas emissions even under very optimistic scenarios (Fulton et al., 2013; Harvey, 2013). Growth in demand for mobility outpaces efficiency gains. Even when taking into consideration a substantial take-up of more efficient vehicle technology and some modal shifts, transport CO₂ emissions in 2050 will still be at 2015 levels of around 7.5 Giga-tonnes of CO₂ (ITF, 2009). If, however, there are no changes to current trends, transport sector greenhouse gas emissions are set to double by 2050 (IPCC, 2014). Setting the transport sector on a low-carbon development pathway is essential for global climate change mitigation efforts that aim to stabilize global warming at well below 2°C, which is the internationally agreed target under the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To contribute to this target developed countries will have to rapidly decarbonize their transport sector over the coming decades (–80% by 2050) and developing and emerging countries will have to curb growth (+70% by 2050), which will require substantial policy action.

The analysis of policy actions in key industrialized and emerging economies carried out as part of the EU-funded SOLUTIONS project (www.uemi.org) shows that there is a substantial gap between the mitigation action needed and the proposed policy actions by countries (Yang et al., 2017). The analysis shows that urban passenger transport and surface freight transport need to play a major role in decarbonizing the sector, both in managing growth in emerging economies and drastically reducing emissions in industrialized economies, even more so when aiming for a 1.5°C stabilization pathway. Integrated assessment models underestimate the role of modal shifts and changing travel patterns and their role to achieve wider sustainable development objectives along with the ability of a broader policy approach to potentially support coalition building of policy actors that represent these objectives (van Vuuren et al., 2015; Edelenbosch et al., 2017; Roelfsema et al., 2018).

Urban passenger transport also plays a particularly important role in providing access to urban services, economic opportunities, and social participation (Bibas et al., 2015; Admasu et al., 2016; Angel and Blei, 2016). Car, but also bus, travel is projected to increase rapidly in developing and emerging economies. This reflects the growing travel demand in developing economies, which is a vital component of economic development (Berry et al., 2016; Gschwender et al., 2016; Spyra and Salmhofer, 2016).

Several international assessments have analyzed the technological potential and effort required to decarbonize the transport sector (IPCC, 2014; Dessens et al., 2016; Figueroa Meza et al., 2014; Fulton et al., 2013). These analyses show that, moving on to a stabilization pathway that is consistent with global climate change targets, transport needs to decarbonize substantially over the coming decades and almost entirely in industrialized countries by the middle of this century (IEA, 2009; ITF, 2009). Taking this path will unlock direct and indirect benefits that outweigh the costs, with savings of between USD 50 and 100 trillion in fuel savings, reduced vehicle purchases, needed infrastructure, and fuel costs (IEA, 2012b). The additional cobenefits and synergies generated by sustainable mobility, such as improved safety and air quality and reduced travel time make an even stronger case for the shift towards low-carbon transport, which is the guiding framework for the scenarios developed for this book. The contribution of countries to the global decarbonization efforts of the (land) transport sec...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Trends, Drivers, and Pathways for Sustainable Urban Mobility
• Chapter 2. Sustainable Urban Mobility Solutions for Asia, Latin America and the Mediterranean Region
• Chapter 3. Decarbonization Scenarios for Transport and the Role of Urban Mobility
• Chapter 4. Opportunities for Synergies and Cobenefits
• Chapter 5. Governance and Institutions for a Long-Term Transition to Low-Carbon Mobility
• Chapter 6. National Urban Mobility Policy Frameworks
• Chapter 7. Sustainable Urban Mobility in Action
• Index