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On road towards sustainability? Inverse the factor 4 in financing

How do we get land transport on the track towards sustainability?

This was one of the questions of last week that witnessed intense and exciting exchange at the Transport Research Board, and a special conference on Transforming Transportation in Washington, D.C. From a climate perspective, sustainable translates into low-carbon transportation. However, sustainable transportation also comprises equity and accesssibility, public heat, such as air pollution and noise but also effects related to physical activity, and time and monetary cost of transportation.

Land transportation is responsible for 5-30% of greenhouse gas emissions of countries. Currently, transport’s share of GHG emissions is signficantly lower in developing countries than it is in OECD countries, notably the U.S. However, emission growth is heading north. Sustainable transport policies are not incredibly challenging to understand. They include pedestrian facilities, a network of well maintained bicycle lanes, parking facilities for bicycles, a bus or tram network for medium sized city, and an additional subway/metro network for larger cities and metropolitan regions. Crucially, non-motorized transport and public transit must have priority before car transport wherever these modes struggle for space. The spatial dimension is indeed the most interesting and challenging: what is the optimal land-use policy related to sustainable transport? When facilities, jobs and residential areas are well connected to public transit, sustainable modes of transport can guarantee accessibility. Now, sustainable transport is less expensive than building highways but it still must be financed. Let’s look at the financial flows of the development banks as of 2007 (Figure below).

Source: ADB, 2009

·            The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank commit about three fourth of their transport lending towards roads and highways (ADB, 2009). There is basically no funding for pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.

·           More generally, multilateral development banks still fund dirty projects (fossile fuel related) with 4 times more money than green projects. Bilateral agencies are only little better (Hicks et al., 2008; for some further discussion and data see Creutzig and Kammen, 2009)

·            According to a former Bank member, the World Bank never funded a pedestrian project. One proposed project was rejected, as the financing volume was too small.

When financing of sustainable transport projects increases sustantially, a huge number of projects could be funded as bycicle lanes, but also bus rapid transit systems are not incredibly expensive. Of same importance is the reduction of conventional projects, such as highway construction. In transport, infrastructure supply induces demand, and additional road network will increase automobile dependency, can even lock-in developing countries into car dependency as it happened before to other countries. Hence, a goal from the top-down perspective is to inverse the factor 4 in financing: 4 times more money into sustainable road projects than into road construction (certain projects probably still make sense). As banks and donors work mostly with large chunks of money, but also as sustainable transport projects work best in a system’s approach, it is in many cases best to bundle projects into city-wide packages.

As a side note: The factor 4 also finds itself in the paper of the TRB conference last week. A simple word search in TRB papers found approximately 4 times more hits for highway (1822) than sustainable (337), and cars (1822) versus pedestrians and bicycles combined (495). Science needs to switch, too.

ADB, 2009. Rethinking Transport and Climate Change. Working paper series.

Hicks, R., Parks, B. C., Roberts, J. T., & Tierney, M. J. (2008). Greening Aid? Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

F. Creutzig, D. M. Kammen (2009) The Post-Copenhagen Roadmap Towards Sustainability: Differentiated Geographic Approaches, Integrated Over Goals
INNOVATION, Vol 4 (4): 301-321

Posted by Felix Creutzig on January 19, 2010 11:05 AM | Permalink