Report on data analysis and GHG emissions estimates related to travel choice (EU FP7 CATCH Project Deliverable 3.2)

Waygood, E.O.D.; Chatterton, Tim; Avineri, Erel

Abstract

This report describes the objectives and activities defined and carried out by task 3.2 “Data Collection/Collation/Specification” within Work Package 3 in CATCH.

The Carbon Aware Travel Choice (CATCH) project was developed in response to the FP7 call for proposals that would help cities to reduce the amount of CO2 produced by travel choices. Alternative fuel technologies, sustainable transport policies, and new technologies applied to support mobility (and virtual mobility) are being developed and fine tuned throughout Europe. These technologies offer opportunities to move towards a more sustainable future. However, despite a range of initiatives, most of which are supported through projects funded by the European Commission, there is still a need for a trusted and easily accessible resource which enables travellers, policy makers and operators, and other stakeholders, to determine appropriate actions to address the growing environmental challenge of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from urban transport by encouraging carbon-friendly travel choices.
In response to that, the CATCH project aims to develop a knowledge engine to inject carbon reduction into the public’s and policy maker’s decision making . This will be an online knowledge platform that aims to:
• support city stakeholders to develop sustainable transport policies;
• motivate travellers to adopt sustainable transport choices.

The CATCH project has developed a knowledge platform that includes two tools that allow for visualisation of data at the city level (the co-benefit tool, also called “My City”, and the Scenario tool, developed in WP4). The input to both tools is the GHG and Performance Database. The database structure was initially developed in T3.1 and described in D3.1. This document describes how data was identified and assessed, and how the database has been populated with relevant data as well as the estimation of city-specific per-capita road transport CO2 emissions.
Road transport CO2 emissions were estimated by using the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR), GIS data and the application of a ‘top-down’ methodology. The publishing in 2011 of a spatially disaggregated inventory of a range of diffuse atmospheric emissions based on the E-PRTR marked a significant advance in understanding variations in emissions from various sources Europe. Through this release, the CATCH platform was able to estimate city-level road transport CO2 emissions for over one hundred cities.
Over 40 different indicators had sufficient coverage for the 149 cities for which per-capita road transport CO2 emissions estimates were created. That data feeds the My City tool of WP4. The My City tool allows for cities to be compared and ranks them according to their per-capita road transport CO2 emissions (and other indicators, or ‘co-benefits’). Further, it uses the 43 indicators to show how the cities are performing in six different policy areas.

The data that feeds into the Scenario tool is not as expansive. However, over seventy cities were identified that had 10 common indicators with at least three distinct results. Currently, the only transport indicator is car ownership and it is not possible to include CO2 emissions estimates as only one year exists in the E-PRTR data.
Future directions of this work include expanding and building upon the indicators that are available for both tools. In particular, now that a baseline has been established using the E-PRTR, accurate historic data and future versions of the E-PRTR data would allow for trending.

• Report Type: Technical Report
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2011
• Deposit Date: Feb 11, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 20, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: travel, choice, emissions, GHG, greenhouse gases, GIS, sustainable cities
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/957436
• Additional Information: Additional Information : [e-mail]
• Contract Date: Sep 20, 2016