Summary

Welcome Remarks

Hironori Hamanaka, IGES, welcomed participants to the IGES Side Event Day. He noted that the IGES decision to hold six side events at the 14th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC is a clear indication of its commitment to allocate substantial resources for contributing to global climate policy processes. Professor Hamanaka mentioned that issues such as rewarding co-benefits of the transportation sector, Asian perspectives on the post-2012 climate regime, adaptation metrics, and reforms to market mechanisms would be discussed at these events.

Opening Remarks

Toshiro Kojima, IGES, opened the meeting by noting that the rapid motorization of developing Asia will have significant implications for urban air quality and global warming. He suggested that the best way to reduce these impacts is with policies that tackle both local transportation priorities and global climate concerns. Unfortunately, the current climate regime offers few incentives for countries to pursue such integrated transportation strategies. Mr. Kojima noted that the challenge for climate negotiators will be to design a future climate regime that rewards countries for integrated transportation strategies.

Summary of IGES Consultations on Co-benefits

Ancha Srinivasan and Eric Zusman, IGES, summarised the main findings from three IGES consultations on transportation co-benefits held in 2008. They noted that the consultations revealed numerous domestic and international policy challenges to realizing transportation co-benefits. They noted that the current climate regime does not offer strong incentives to overcome these barriers, and attributed the weakness to the Clean Development Mechanism’s (CDM) additionality rules, project-based scope, and failure to adjust credits for high-development projects. They suggested that expanding the scope of the CDM to the policy level and relaxing additionality rules for transportation projects with high developmental benefits could help overcome barriers in the short-term. Multiplication factors for credits from development-friendly transportation projects could be considered in the long-term.

Overcoming Obstacles, Identifying Opportunities

Cornie Huizenga, Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia), Philippines, observed that the rapidly expanding scale of Asia’s transportation sector makes it imperative that transport receives more attention from international climate negotiators. He further noted that as the transportation sector gains greater attention, climate negotiators should recognize that it is more cost-effective to address local air pollution and climate change problems in an integrated manner. This is especially important because of the emerging consensus that particulate matter (PM) is a net climate warmer, which makes the transport sector an even more attractive target for integrated policies. Mr. Huizenga also stressed the importance of not only integrated but innovative transportation solutions, such as China’s promotion of e-bikes.

Kazunobu Onogawa, United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), Japan, suggested that greenhouse gas reductions of transportation policies were really co-benefits not the local air quality improvements or enhanced energy security that are often treated as co-benefits by climate community. He then provided an overview of several initiatives that UNCRD has supported to promote environmentally sustainable transport (EST) solutions that can deliver climate co-benefits. These included (a) the Aichi Statement, which led to the establishment of a Regional EST Forum for the promotion of EST in Asia, and (b) the Kyoto Declaration that aims to enhance synergies between national, local, and regional policymakers to realize the goal of sustainability in Asia’s transport sector.

Panel Discussion

Taka Hiraishi, IGES, moderated the panel discussion. Panellists were asked to respond to questions regarding the barriers to realizing transportation co-benefits, reforms to the CDM and other market mechanisms, and synergies between the UNFCCC and non-UNFCCC initiatives.

Kotaro Kawamata, Ministry of Environment, Japan (MoEJ), noted that many countries in Asia lacked the awareness, capacity, and finance to realize transportation co-benefits. To overcome these obstacles, he supported granting preferential treatment to transportation projects with co-benefits by reducing project registration costs, expediting project approvals, and introducing other procedural reforms to the CDM. He further suggested that climate negotiators should also consider establishing separate financial mechanism for the transportation sector that would operate outside the CDM. Finally, he underlined the importance of strengthening synergies between the UNFCCC and official development assistance (ODA) to fund transportation projects with significant upfront costs and high levels of investor risk.

Nitu Goel, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India, discussed the barriers to realizing co-benefits in India. She suggested that the lack of finance for innovative transportation strategies was the chief barrier in Indian cities. She also pointed to the importance getting the policy design “right”, strengthening research and development, and overcoming resistance to behavioural changes to realize transportation co-benefits. She then described the barriers in the CDM, focusing on complex methodologies and the related difficulties of developing baselines for the sector. She felt that simplifying methodologies was a necessary first step to increase flows of carbon finance to transportation policies.

Holger Dalkmann, Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), United Kingdom, suggested that the CDM was not designed to bring carbon finance to the transportation sector. He noted that changing the rules of the CDM to reward co-benefits would increase the mechanism’s administrative complexity and thereby discourage investors from supporting transport projects. Instead of reforming the CDM, he proposed an entirely new mechanism—a clean transport mechanism (CTM). A key element of the CTM would be voluntary no-lose sectoral targets that would reward credits to entire sets of policies that fell below an ambitious target but would not penalize countries for exceeding that target. He also suggested that it would be useful to introduce a simple labelling system to identify transportation projects and policies with significant sustainable development benefits.

Jo Junhaeng, The Korea Transport Institute (KTI), Korea, discussed the two chief barriers to realizing co-benefits in Korea. The first was difficulties of reconciling the Road Bureau’s emphasis on building more roads with the Traffic Bureau’s emphasis on designing more efficient road networks. The second was people’s unwillingness to change their lifestyle and driving habits once they purchased a personal vehicle. Dr. Jo then proposed two indirect solutions to these problems. The first was for city governments to take the lead in investing in low-carbon, eco-friendly infrastructure. The second was for transportation researchers to generate data that would be relevant to the climate negotiations. On this latter point, he suggested technologies could be added onto a car to gather measurable, reportable and verifiable emissions data.

Kazunobu Onogawa noted that realizing transportation co-benefits is only possible when climate change and transportation communities begin to work in a more collaborative manner.

Cornie Huizenga stressed the need to include transport issues in climate change discussions and integrate climate change concerns in transport policies. He noted that recognition and rewarding of transportation co-benefits should not be confined to CDM in the future climate regime, and that resources available outside the regime, especially those available from multilateral financial institutions, should be used.

Discussion

The event concluded with a discussion of the importance in developing Asia of quantifying economic costs of traffic congestion and time-savings of integrated transportation strategies. It was mentioned that several Asian cities lose as much as 2-6% of annual GDP due to traffic congestion alone, and that quantitative assessment of co-benefits in economic terms often resonates with policymakers more than the health impacts featured in most co-benefit studies. Participants also recognized the need for development of less sophisticated tools to quantify co-benefits, which are appropriate for a developing country context. Some participants raised concerns about the effects of relaxing additionality for transportation CDM projects on the environmental integrity of the future climate regime.