Sustainable Mobility – Editorial Introduction

Sustainable mobility is a relatively new concept in the history of transportation. Its origin has been dated to 1992 and the publication of a European Communities Green Paper on ‘The Impact of Transport on the Environment: A Community strategy for “sustainable mobility”’ (Commission of the European Communities, 1992; see Holden et al., 2020: 2). As anthropogenic climate change has become a climate emergency (UNEP, n.d.), however, the transition to a sustainable mobility system has taken on great urgency. Transport currently generates about one-quarter of global CO2 emissions and approximately 14 percent of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (see, inter alia, IEA, 2019; Planete Energies, 2019; WRI, 2019). More troublingly, emissions from transport continue to grow, driven in part by both population growth and economic growth. Looking specifically at the UK, with declining emissions elsewhere in the economy, transport in 2018 (the most recent year for which we have data) was the single largest emitter1. Despite the first (small) fall in emissions in 2018 since 2013, transport emissions were only 3 percent lower than in 1990. Meanwhile, for the EU28, in 2017, transport emissions (excluding international shipping) were 28 percent above 1990 levels. Aviation saw the largest increase (129 percent), but road transport still dominated transport emissions (71.7 percent), with cars contributing 44.3 percent to total transport emissions (EEA, 2019). Other data suggest that from 1990 to 2016, transport emissions rose by 144 percent in Brazil, 322 percent in India and 794 percent in China (WRI, 2019). Looking over time, road transport has also contributed 80 percent of the growth in emissions between 1970 and 2010 (WRI, 2019). Aviation and shipping contribute just over 10