Achieving Sustainable Mobility in Developing Countries: Suggestions for a Post-2012 Agreement

Abstract

In December 2009, countries meet in Copenhagen to establish a new global climate agreement. This article links the need for reducing transport-related greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries with the current international climate negotiations. Arguing that a sustainable transport approach requires comprehensive policy packages, it assesses the suitability of current climate negotiation proposals in promoting sustainable transport. The project-based approach under the current climate regime incentivises neither comprehensive sustainable transport and mobility policies, nor sufficient numbers of local projects. Current proposals to increase efforts by developing countries, to reform the Clean Development Mechanism, and to create new emission trading mechanisms are promising but still have to overcome several obstacles. One obstacle involves how to properly assess the impact of actions while maintaining streamlined procedures. The authors conclude from their analysis that the best way forward would be to establish an international mitigation fund with a dedicated transport window financed by industrialised countries. This fund would enable developing countries to implement national policies and local projects. Developing countries would outline low-carbon development strategies, including a sectoral strategy for low-carbon transport.

Making climate instruments work for sustainable transport in developing countries

“…For the transport sector, standardized baselines may also be applicable, however, there are no concrete proposals as of yet. Possible examples mentioned include modal splits, occupancy rates and emissions per unit of travel (Bongardt et al ., 2009; TRL, 2010), particularly for specific vehicle fleets such as taxis, buses or rail systems. If standardized baselines could be developed and applied successfully, this would significantly reduce the methodological and possibly the data‐related problems that transport‐CDM projects currently face.…”

“…However, the reason for this difficulty is that there are many objectives other than climate mitigation involved in the undertaking of an activity and the CER contribution to overall profitability is relatively low. It is hard to imagine that many transport sector project types will be included in a positive list (Bongardt et al ., 2009).…”

“…Sectoral crediting assesses the performance of a whole sector instead of individual activities, although monitoring will still need to be performed at an installation level for aggregation into a sector level. If this approach can be developed, it has great potential for the transport sector, but establishing full sectoral emissions inventories or sectoral benchmarks is likely to be a challenge (Bongardt et al ., 2009).…”

Shifting to low-carbon transport in Asean : policy development in a rapidly motorising region

“…The GEF provides grants to developing countries to address global environmental issues, including climate change, on the basis of the agreed full incremental cost (Article 4.3, UNFCCC (Bongardt et al (2009)) and is used by the UNFCCC as its financial mechanism. In 2000, the GEF Council approved Operational Program #11 (OP 11 -"Promoting Environmentally Sustainable Transport"), a programme aimed at enhancing efforts in the transport sector.…”

“…For the transport sector, standardised baselines may also be applicable, however, there are no concrete proposals as of yet. Possible examples mentioned include modal splits, occupancy rates and emissions per unit of travel (Bongardt et al, 2009;TRL, 2010), particularly for specific vehicle fleets such as taxis, buses or rail systems. If standardised baselines could be developed and applied successfully, this would significantly reduce the methodological and possibly the data-related problems that transport-CDM projects currently face.…”