Overview
29 September 2020, 11:00 - 12:30 CEST
Register at the link below.
Speakers:
- Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Professor at the Central European University and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy
- Piotr Szymanski, Energy, Transport and Climate Director at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC)
- Sergio Barbarino, Research fellow - Open innovation at Procter & Gamble and Vice-chair of ALICE
- Frode Hvattum, Public Transport, Vice Director of the EU Department of UITP
- Jean-Marc Sohier, Science Director of Concawe
- Henk Prins, Chairman of the Waterborne Technology Platform
Moderator:
Darren McGarry, Team leader Communication & Visualisation, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Petten, NL
Organisers:
Biagio Ciuffo, Scientific Officer, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, IT
Ferenc Pekár, Scientific Project Manager at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, IT
Transport activities generate almost a quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in Europe, and under the current trends transport could become the main source of greenhouse gas emissionsin a few years. In fact, it is among the few sectors that have shown a constant increase in CO2emissions over the last decades, in part due to an ever-increasing transport demand for passengers and goods. It is therefore a major challenge to develop new solutions and paradigms to improve transport efficiency and drastically reduce CO2 emissions, while at the same time promote an effective and equitable governance of the complex transport system in order to foster the use of the most efficient transport modes.
New technological options – such as electrification, sustainable fuels, connectivity and automation – represent important opportunities to make transport more efficient, but technologies alone will not be sufficient to achieve a sustainable, accessible and fair transport system. All these new technology trends require a systemic approach bridging across several sectors and transport modes. Digitalization will indeed play a major role in enabling a better governance of the transport system and allowing its smart and efficient integration with other systems, such as energy and land-use systems.
The need to define mechanisms to achieve a climate-driven sustainable interaction between transport demand and supply is also likely to emerge, and users shall play a central role in the process. This system approach will also require the co-operation of all the actors involved in the transport system, with companies adopting a collaborative approach within platforms, together with public actors from different levels including local authorities, which will take a more proactive role in managing mobility of people and goods.
The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility are of utmost relevance: on the one hand, significantly lower transport demand can help reducing CO2 emissions from transport, even if users in the short term may switch to individual transport solutions from public transport. On the other hand, transport operators need to face unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic.