Greenhouse Gas Emission Mitigation Pathways for Urban Passenger Land Transport under Ambitious Climate Targets

Abstract

Urban passenger land transport is an important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, but it is challenging to mitigate these emissions as this sector interacts with many other economic sectors. We develop the Climate change constrained Urban passenger Transport Integrated Life cycle assessment (CURTAIL) model to outline mitigation pathways of urban passenger land transport that are consistent with ambitious climate targets. CURTAIL uses the transport activity of exogenously defined modal shares to simulate the associated annual vehicle stocks, sales, and life cycle GHG emissions. It estimates GHG emission budgets that are consistent with global warming below 2 and 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels and seeks mitigation strategies to remain within the budgets. We apply it to a case study of Singapore, a city-state. Meeting a 1.5 °C target requires strong commitments in the transport and electricity sectors, such as reducing the motorized passenger activity, accelerating the deployment of public transit and of electrification, and decarbonizing the power generation system. Focusing on one mitigation technology or one mode of transport alone will not be sufficient to meet the target. Our novel model could be applied to any city to provide insights relevant to the design of urban climate change mitigation targets and policies.

The effect of sustainable mobility transition policies on cumulative urban transport emissions and energy demand

“…Transport models outside the UK have compared the impact of policies on emissions to national carbon budgets 26 , 41 , 42 but have not explored the uncertainty in carbon budget allocation. Notably for urban analysis, a 2010 study analysed potential policy packages in London 43 and more recently, CURTAIL was built as a transport modelling framework to analyse mitigation efforts for cities using Singapore as a case-study 44 . Nevertheless, there exists a lack of studies conducted at a local sub-national (e.g., city) level where policy suggestions become most relevant 45 and this is especially true for assessments of sufficiency and energy demand reductions.…”

Minimum-Cost Fast-Charging Infrastructure Planning for Electric Vehicles along the Austrian High-Level Road Network

“…Essentially, there are four main potential drivers to counteract increasing GHG emissions in the face of rising travel demand, namely: avoidance of journeys, shift to low-carbon modes, fuel substitution and improvements in energy efficiency [15][16][17]. These drivers are deeply intertwined, and their effectiveness is rooted in technological progress, social learning and infrastructure adoptions [16,18].…”

Trade-Offs between Direct Emission Reduction and Intersectoral Additional Emissions: Evidence from the Electrification Transition in China’s Transport Sector

“…51−54 IAMs can get robust findings but hard to incorporate differentiated details in transport technologies based on differentiated research topics. 15,19 Many modelers are inclined to modify existing assumptions and parameter settings of GCAM 55−57 or couple with another model 58,59 to incorporate details that GCAM cannot provide to fill this gap: Zhang et al 60 have modified assumptions to derive more realistic estimates of future energy crop potential in China; Markandya et al 61 have coupled an air quality model with GCAM to estimate the concentrations of certain air pollutants and the resulting associated premature deaths and morbidity; Dong et al 62 integrated GCAM and the spatial explicit land-use change model to describe the degree of social development and corresponding influences on land use.…”

“…Existing studies regarding electrification can categorize into two dimensions: how to achieve ambitious electrification targets the government set and what the impacts will be if the targets are achieved. , Among several strategies for achieving targets, pursuing cost-effectiveness − has been widely proposed to accelerate the electrification in the transport sector, which is a market-oriented measure. Besides, subsidy policies, − improvements of infrastructure, − and changes in human attitude and behavior , have been considered as individual measures to increase electrification rates and can interact with each other to achieve in-depth electrification eventually.…”