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Press Releases

08 Nov 2021

Launching ITS for Climate Impact Mitigation Preliminary Report


During the session

In accordance of building knowledge among road transport stakeholders from public and private sectors and to identify appropriate, feasible and effective decarbonisation measures the IRF ITS Committee Task Force has released a report named ‘ITS for Climate Impact Mitigation’ at the 18th IRF World Meeting & Exhibition.  It includes a comprehensive review of existing ITS solutions and their impact, and their potential contribution to reduce substantially the carbon emissions due to road transport.

Following successful research and demonstration activities, the ITS industry in close cooperation with transport authorities and road operators has been developing knowledge from operational case studies in different regions of the world that give concrete evidences on the potential of ITS in contributing to emission reduction and therefore in helping road transport community in meeting climate impact mitigation targets. 

According to the report, road transport stakeholders from public and private sectors have a major role to play in transforming road infrastructure towards drastic emission reduction by 2030. Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITS) and enabling Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been very successful in the last decades in delivering key solutions to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. Transport infrastructure is essential to sustainable development and to regional, national and transnational cooperation and can improve a region's global competitiveness.

However, the transport sector is also one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, largely driven by the fact that fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy consumption in transport, the sector is responsible for approximately 16% of global GHG emissions, making it the third-largest contributor to GHG pollution after energy and buildings.  
 
In addition, the ITF Transport Outlook 2021 predicts that the global transport activity is expected to more than double by 2050, due to population growth and economic development and traffic emissions are expected to rise by 16% compared to 2015 - even if existing commitments to decarbonise transport are fully implemented. Any currently expected emissions reductions will be more than offset by the increased demand for transport, which would overshoot the levels needed to reduce global warming by 1.5% by about 3 times. 

To guide those responsible for deployment this report highlights a suggested “top 10” of ITS tools for decarbonising roads, transport and mobility.  Criteria for their selection include:

•    mature and affordable solutions, ready for rapid implementation
•    strong, or at least sufficient evidence of effectiveness to reduce CO2 (and pollutant) emissions
•    widely deployed or available, and able to deliver immediate benefits
•    together they should address all main sources of emissions, and be of value to their owners. 

In using this guidance, tools that are most appropriate for ones own sphere of activity can be chosen. When combining multiple tools as a bundle, the total reduction in emissions achieved may not be the sum of the potential savings of all tools individually; however, bundling can also reduce costs and increase total emission reductions. The Task Force recognises that more work is needed on how best to select, combine and apply these tools - innovative system thinking is needed. 


 

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