Leaders and laggards in transport CO2 emissions: The challenges and outcomes of benchmarking sustainable urban transport systems across Europe

Waygood, Owen; Chatterton, Tim; Avineri, Erel

Abstract

The transport sector represents roughly 18% of the CO2 emissions in the EU and is the only sector that has continued to increase emissions. As most people live and work in cities in the EU, it is important to identify the leaders and laggards with regard to efforts to decrease CO2 emissions from transport. Further, to help support change, identification of correlations between transport emissions and other policy levels would be beneficial. Yet,until recently, there was no city-level results available related to emissions across the EU. Now, the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) inventory of diffuse sources allows for analysis of a range of atmospheric emissions at a 5 km resolution. However, before applying this data to inform practitioners and policymakers, validation of the data would be required by having it compared to the CO2 emissions estimated by an alternative methodology. The UK government maintains a higher (1 km) resolution emissions inventory based on a ‗bottom-up‘ methodology. The UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) has been used to assess the reliability of the new E-PRTR data. This paper first confirms the reliability of the E-PRTR data at city scales, and then gives examples of ranking and finally associations with other indicators in both transport and other policy areas.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: The 44th Annual UTSG (The Universities' Transport Study Group) Conference
• Start Date: Jan 4, 2012
• End Date: Jan 6, 2012
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 8, 2019
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: carbon emissions, travel behaviour, climate change
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/951138
• Publisher URL: http://www.utsg.net
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : The 44th Annual UTSG (The Universities' Transport Study Group) Conference