Overview – Transport and Sustainability

Transport is a major industry that is vital for economic development but at the same time imposes
serious burdens on the environment. Transport provides the physical lubrication that allows for
industrial growth and trade, but it also is responsible for a wide range of local atmospheric pollution,
noise and soil and water contamination, as well as being a large and growing contributor to greenhouse
gas emissions. Sustainable development is generally understood to mean that the current population
should leave their heirs a resource base comparable to the one that they inherited. This involves not
only environmental factors but also economic and social considerations. It is also a holistic concept that,
for example, allows for trade-offs between such things as transport and other activities provided the
resource base remains intact. Operationalization of the concept, however, has led to stove piping with
notions such as sustainable transport or sustainable mobility lending to efforts to simply optimize within
transport. The result has been a series of policy initiatives at various levels of government designed to
retain a given level of mobility without depleting the resource base.

Transport and climate change: a review

Transport accounts for 26% of global CO2 emissions and is one of the few industrial sectors where
emissions are still growing. Car use, road freight and aviation are the principal contributors to
greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector and this review focuses on approaches to reduce
emissions from these three problem areas. An assessment of new technologies including alternative
transport fuels to break the dependence on petroleum is presented, although it appears that
technological innovation is unlikely to be the sole answer to the climate change problem. To achieve a
stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions from transport, behavioural change brought about by policy
will also be required. Pressure is growing on policy makers to tackle the issue of climate change with a
view to providing sustainable transport. Although, there is a tendency to focus on long-term
technological solutions, short-term behavioural change is crucial if the benefits of new technology are to
be fully realised.