Climate and transport planning: a messy junction

Abstract

The European Union aims to be climate neutral by 2050. The EU Parliament and Commission have agreed to the European Green Deal in 2020 (EU, 2019). While National Governments are required to develop national long term strategies, cities and local authorities are the ones dealing with actions to decarbonize urban transport, housing, waste, etc.

Transport in cities play a very important role. The global transport sector is responsible for a quarter of EU CO2 emissions, and while most sector have started a downward trend to decarbonise, we find that in road transport this is not the case (European Environment Agency, 2022).

Some cities are implementing measures to try to achieve some reductions but these are scattered and a systems approach is needed, not only to think  about the technologic or operational solutions (innovations) but also to be more democratic and ask the stakeholders their views.

Moreover, all sectors need to be working in collaboration to achieve a net zero goal for the whole city. Therefore, at the strategic level, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, Transport Strategies, Local Transport Plans, need to be integrated into Climate Plans.

The Climate Plan and Transport Actions database is a set of spreadsheets that contains data 50 European Climate Plans approved after the EU net zero target. The user can search for transport actions and identify which cities are planning to apply them. Once the city/cities were identified, the user can use the third sheet to get a link to the Climate Plan, with further information about that action. The goal of the database is to help cities to identify suitable transport actions to include in their climate planning strategies.

 The database is made of 3 sheets:

1. Grouped actions: this spreadsheet includes the list of aggregated transport actions from 50 European climate plans. Categories were created to aggregate similar actions from different cities. Actions are categorized using the Avoid-Shift-Improve approach. This sheet can be used to search for categories/actions and identify which city is planning to implement them.
2. Individual actions: this spreadsheet includes the full list of actions from 50 European cities action plans without being aggregated.
3. Cities Climate Plans: this spreadsheet is based on a CDP database(CDP, 2024). The spreadsheet was completed by reviewing all Climate Plans. It includes a weblink for each plan. User cities can assess whether the actions and cities are closer to their local environment or landscape by using a city with a similar population, similar strategic planning background, level of autonomy index, etc.

The analysis of the database shows that while transport is a key component of Climate Plans, the link between strategies is less obvious. It is unusual to have an only Transport Decarbonisation Plan, therefore, to reduce the need of resources and promote system thinking (the city and its functions as a whole) we need to ensure strategic alignment between both tools.

A majority of plans does not include citizen participation, nor an assessment of synergies, trade-offs or co-benefits of specific actions at the planning stage. However, plans do consider monitoring and evaluation and have some assessment of the level of impact that climate change will have on their territories.

Many plans do not go beyond specific actions, or how those actions would impact on other systems outside their own.

While most cities have at least one previous experience in planning related to climate change, public sector alone won't suffice. With private sector, NGOs, research facilities and public sector requiring employees with new skills, medium to long term strategies and goals are needed to incentivize an uptake on certain skills.