Workshop 1: Climate change and transport

26th May 2009 Edinburgh

This workshop was facilitated by Dr Jillian Anable from CTR Aberdeen and focused on understanding how public policy, governance and delivery can be improved to increase the potential for achieving GHG emissions reductions from transport within the Scottish Climate Change Programme.

Christer Ljungberg from Trivector in Sweden gave a presentation on Sweden’s efforts to reduced GHG emissions from transport with a focus on the governance structures and delivery mechanisms in place to achieve this.

The key points arising from the workshop presentations and subsequent discussions were as follows:

After a whistle-stop tour through the current situation with GHG emissions from transport in Scotland and the mechanisms in place to deal with them, Jillian’s presentation concluded that there is something of a mismatch between the scale of the carbon reduction challenges and the delivery mechanisms in place.  Policy tools and goals are not fully aligned, and carbon reduction is not placed at the heart of all policy and strategy.   She argued that using technology to reduce energy consumption by engines or further developing alternatively powered vehicles is part of the solution, but changing peoples travel behaviour to sustainable modes needs to occur also.
Christer’s presentation showed that, in Sweden, there is a tradition of very strong local authorities that have considerable financial independence because they have income tax-raising powers.  In addition, many of these authorities are able to work quite co-operatively with the National Roads Administration, which provides additional funding for roads, cycling and roads-based public transport schemes.  Furthermore, local public transport is not deregulated (at present) but managed by regional bodies that tender services to private contractors, and there is fully developed integrated ticketing scheme at the regional level.  Nonetheless, at a national scale, trends in transport use and greenhouse gas emissions from transport are not dissimilar from those in Scotland, due to the relative cost of different modes of transport and increasing wealth fuelling increasing car use and growth in average trip lengths.

Christer gave examples of two cities from his home region, Malmo and Lund, which have to some extent bucked the trend of increasing car use.  The critical factors in achieving this were long term political support for pro-environmental transport policies and, in Lund, the existence of a sustainable urban transport plan, Lundamats.  Christer felt that, because local economic development, employment, housing and education have been at a high level for many years in southern Sweden, this has made transport and particularly environment a much bigger issue for local authorities than it perhaps is in Scotland.

The discussion on delivery and governance structures in Scotland concluded that these were perhaps less significant barriers to the implementation of policies to reduce GHG emissions from transport than aspects such as political leadership and political culture.  The apparently greater interest in environmental matters in Sweden, and the much longer period over which these have been politically important, were cited as examples of this.

This then sparked discussion of issues that could be the topic of future workshops.  It was felt that political scientists and cultural theorists could add to our understanding of how public policy is shaped in Scotland, and how this then affects transport policy.  It was also felt that examples of less good practice could help to illuminate the policy making and implementation process.  Finally, a workshop that considers how policy makers need and consume academic research, and how academics and policy makers could perhaps understand one another rather better, was also thought to be valuable.

In terms of reflecting on the usefulness of the day’s seminar, the international examples and the opportunity to consider the “bigger picture” were felt to be useful.

Download workshop presentations:

• CLICK HERE to download: "Climate Change and Transport: delivery Structures to meet NPF objectives"
  - Dr Jillian Anable, CTR, University of Aberdeen
• CLICK HERE to download: "Reducing GHG emissions in Sweden, the role of the transport sector"
  - Christer Ljungberg, Trivector Traffic AB