The Scottish Government's independent advisory body on sustainable development
News
Sustainable transport in Scotland needs a positive vision
18 October 2009
An SDC Scotland project will explore ways to reduce emissions from the transport sector through a new approach to investment. The focus will be on encouraging behaviour change, health outcomes and alternative transport models.
There seems to be an endless stream of arguments for a new road or an airport expansion. Taken together all these capital and carbon intensive projects have left us with transport infrastructure which doesn’t actively support sustainable travel choices. Many don’t see any alternatives to taking the car to work and the holiday flight.
Our new transport project will
- Analyse current Scottish transport policy
- Analyse indicators and targets and how these can contribute to lowering emissions
- Describe the underpinning principles for sustainable transport strategies
- Give detailed examples of effective interventions
- Describe what a sustainable transport strategy for Scotland might look like
It is important that focus goes beyond emissions and economic growth as isolated objectives and measures. Transport policy can have great positive impacts on other important areas such as health, social justice and community. Emissions from transport are also influenced by non-transport policies such as town planning and incentives for working from home. We aim to make these links and their benefits more explicit.
SDC has spent the last year developing a hierarchy for analysing transport initiatives from a sustainable development perspective. The model focuses on alternatives to large capital investment, delivering not only solutions to transport problems but also wider benefits for community development, local businesses, health and well being.
Greater alignment between policy objectives based on sustainable development targets and the many transport project decisions made is sorely needed. This theme emerged in both our first and second Annual Assessments of progress by the Scottish Government on Sustainable Development. There is growing evidence for and acceptance of this mismatch.
We believe the Government is in real danger of not delivering the required emission reductions without a root and branch re-think of priorities. The Government’s Climate Change Act Delivery Plan has a stated aim of ‘almost complete decarbonisation of road transport by 2050 with significant progress by 2030 through wholesale adoption of electric cars and vans, and significant decarbonisation of rail by 2050.’ Achieving this is a major challenge.
Two recent reports illustrate this: The Carbon Account for Transport (CAT) and the report Mitigating Transport's Climate Change Impact in Scotland: Assessment of Policy Options (MTCI). The CAT shows how high and inelastic the carbon cost of transport is. The MTCI report shows that, even if all its policy scenarios are implemented, Scotland would still only achieve approximately half the emission cuts needed to make transport’s full contribution to Climate Change (Scotland) Act targets.
The MTCI also illustrates how implementing policies aimed at reducing transport emissions largely depends on mass behaviour change by the Scottish population. The Scottish Government’s own study of environmental attitudes and behaviours SEABs’08 show how difficult it can be even for the keenest environmentalist to adopt sustainable transport habits due to the current infrastructure.
