Transport, Development and Climate Change Mitigation: Towards an Integrated Approach

Abstract

Transport and infrastructure development enables economic and social development, but is often detrimental to sustainable development due to congestion, accidents, air pollution, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Various policy frameworks have been created to connect transport with development, development with climate change and climate change mitigation with the transport sector. However, so far no consistent framework exists that addresses these three areas in an integrated manner.This article demonstrates that sustainable development of the transport sector is not viable on the longer term in the absence of such a three-way framework. First, current perspectives and practices on transport and (sustainable) development are reviewed, demonstrating that outcomes and policies are not consistently positive on all three dimensions. The article then re-evaluates the Avoid–Shift–Improve (ASI) approach, initially developed to address climate change mitigation and other environmental issues in the transport sector, adding two perspectives on sustainable development that are not generally taken into account when discussing ASI: transition theory and sustainable lifestyles. Together with attention to the development function of transport by incorporating Access into ASI, this could enable a more long-term sustainability-oriented view on transport, development and climate mitigation.

• Keywords: climate change mitigation
• development
• avoid-shift-improve
• transport policy
• transition
• sustainable lifestyles

Notes

1. In the fields of air quality and road safety, there have been successes in many countries and cities, e.g. due to end-of-pipe solutions, phase-out of leaded fuel, strict speed limits and safety regulations. Individual cities, e.g. Singapore and Shanghai, have demonstrated that it is possible to drastically slow down the rate of motorization through a quota system, which reduces the number of new cars added to the fleet.

2. Mexico, for example, put in place three BRT corridors and extension of subway but at the same time each year 500 000 cars were added as well.

3. Referred to as ‘climate’ in this paper. Climate change adaptation is not dealt with, as this is considered to be part of the ‘development’ aspect of transport policy.

4. Or maintaining the relatively advantageous modal split in favour of public transport in many developing countries.

5. Germany uses the concept in some recent policy documents (Lambrecht et al., 2009) but not in key transport strategies.

6. Though Vietnam is an example of a country using ASI to organize transport policies (Tran, 2013)

7. There are several related concepts in peer-reviewed literature, such low-carbon society, low-carbon economy, and green growth or low-carbon growth.

8. The name of the partnership on sustainable, low-carbon transport (SLoCaT) also reflects this distinction of objectives.

9. This appears to be in line with sustainable economics, which maintains a distinction between growth (increased quantity) and development (increased quality) (Daly, 1996).

10. Some of these points were also discussed in OECD (1997).

11. We use ‘access’, in short of accessibility or access to opportunities.