Thinking about rural transport: Rural life without carbon
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This thinkpiece attempts to envisage how rural communities may need, or choose, to react.This paper attempts to model the contribution that different transport interventions could make towards attaining the government's target of a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 (there is also an interim goal of reducing emissions by 20% by 2020).
The analysis is based on two actual rural settlements (one sparse located in a deep rural area and one less sparse satellite settlement close to a market town), using estimates of 1990 carbon emissions.
The modelling uses three scenarios:
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'do nothing' based on current transport growth predictions and DfT predictions of vehicle fuel efficiency improvements
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enhanced vehicle and fuel technology as presented in the King Review of Low Carbon Cars
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a package of measures incorporating the King Review predictions to 2030 (but not the potential 2050 zero carbon transport scenario) coupled with a range of interventions to encourage travel reduction and modal shift.
Factors taken into account are location, demographics, socio-economic characteristics, local facilities, transport links and transport use. Emphasis is on personal travel, including inward bound trips. The effects of tourism are included and show this can be a significant influence on the carbon footprint.
To counter the possibility that carbon free vehicles may not be universal by 2050, a range of additional measures to reduce travel such as increased teleworking, food deliveries to the settlements replacing individual shopping trips, more mobile services (e.g. healthcare), improved local education provision coupled with a further series of initiatives to change modal split (including visitors) amongst which are incentives to increase walking and cycling and small-scale local public transport improvements.
The analysis concludes that neither community will meet its target for transport carbon reductions when transport is considered in isolation from other possible carbon reduction measures such as zero-carbon electricity generation.
It is also pointed out that voluntary behavioural change alone is unlikely to bring about the desired effects and that there will additionally be a need for a series of 'sticks' (e.g. carbon allowances) to influence the desired outcomes.
These factors have an effect on the environmental quality of rural areas with traffic noise, visual intrusion and pollution on the increase.
This is one of 5 new thinkpieces on transport in rural areas. The other thinkpieces are:
Comments
Thanks for your comment. This, and the other thinkpieces in this series, are an attempt to raise the profile of rural transport issues and place transport at the heart of the debate on climate change.
This thinkpiece references the King Review of Low Carbon Cars, which describes how meeting the government proposed target of reducing total carbon emissions in the UK by 60–80 per cent by 2050 will be a major challenge and will require almost total decarbonisation of the road transport sector.
The King Review suggests that "by 2050, a “carbon-free” fuel mix is a possibility – although this is likely to be largely dependent on the degree to which electricity generation can be decarbonised and will also require significant developments in vehicle technology."
One of the findings of this thinkpiece is that "Although technical solutions have been proposed as a ‘fix’ for carbon emissions, we are concerned that the technology is as yet uninvented, the costs are unclear and the distribution is uncertain."