Digital Toolkit for Energy and Mobility

Given the strong commitment of achieving the Paris Agreement goal of global 2-degree carbon budget, total transport emissions will need to decline to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) by 2050. Instead, they are projected to increase to 12 billion tonnes of CO2eq by 2050. The energy and mobility sectors could yield high impacts in helping to meet sustainable development goals (SDGs), including SDG 13 “Climate Action” supporting the Paris Climate Agreement, in particular, SDG 7 “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” and SDG 11 “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.

Bridging the gap between the transport and energy sectors is crucial when seeking to achieve a universal, efficient, safe, and green mobility while developing sustainable, and energy-efficient transport projects. The interconnections between energy and mobility, although widely recognized, have seldom been explored in detail and their potential has not been fully developed. Even within energy and transport sectors themselves, silos exist, so it is perhaps not inconceivable that silos also exist between these two different sectors.

The Catalogue of Policy Measures (CPM) from the Global Roadmap of Action toward Sustainable Mobility (GRA) contains more than 180 policy measures that have been used and tested around the world in support of sustainable mobility. This paper takes a deep dive into three policies and global experience available to act on the nexus between the transport and energy sector. This includes: “Promote Public Discussion on New Mobility Solutions”; “Expand Public Transport Infrastructure”; and “Plan for Integrated Multimodal Transport Networks” – measures 171, 87, and 5 in the CPM respectively.

The energy and mobility working group selected the three measures of the GRA and identified four practical and easy-to-use steps, namely: set the baseline, identify targets, use strategy and tools available, and explore further resources in a global discussion of the energy and mobility nexus.

Planning officials and policy makers can use these steps to enable access to useful resources and contacts that have not been well integrated between the measures selected toward sustainable mobility through the integration of energy and mobility planning. The toolkit acts as a multiplier of some of the best practices to achieve energy efficiency in transport.
It also adopts the avoid, shift, and improve framework (ASI), which aims to reduce carbon emissions by:

• Avoiding the need to travel through better urban planning, land use control, location-based subsidies, and improved e-communications reinforced by transport demand management.
• Shifting travel by the cleanest and most efficient mode: typically moving people toward nonmotorized transport, mass public transport options, or sustainable individual or shared solutions.
• Improving the efficiency of transport options through technological improvements – often driven by tighter emissions standards – traffic flow management, or subsidies and taxes to promote low emission vehicles and fuel switching.

The content of this toolkit is also integrated in the broader Policy Decision-Making Tool for Sustainable Mobility 2.0. It is a call to action for policy makers and planning officials in transport at the national and municipal levels to plan and implement new low carbon mobility solutions for both passenger and freight transportation. The practical steps and strategies provided in this paper aim to support these solutions