In recent years, cycling has emerged as an increasingly important consideration for national and local authorities around the world, primarily because of the public’s growing awareness about its health benefits and greenhouse emissions reduction. In the last decade, transport related policies in Malaysia and particularly in Kuala Lumpur have been seeking to support cycling as a travel mode, yet, cycling levels in Kuala Lumpur remain low and evidence about interventions are mixed. Data from an exploratory case study is used here to understand the transportation system planning and urban growth of Kuala Lumpur and their impact on cycling uptake, ex- amining current status of cycling facilities in KL, evaluating effectiveness of the cycling interventions, and the attitudes of participants of cycling events towards using bicycle. Using a combination of evidences from existing literature, observation referring to the quality and use of the first bicycle pathway in Kuala Lumpur, interviews with city officials and a survey of people’s attitudes towards using bicycle, this exploratory research highlights the challenges that a car dependent city faces in its urban transformation and in promoting cycling, as well as the residents’ motivations and deterrents to use bicycle for commuting.
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Airport management is often challenged by the task of managing aircraft parking positions most efficiently while complying with environmental regulations and capacity restrictions. Frequently this task is additionally affected by various perturbations, affecting punctuality of airport operations. This paper presents an innovative approach for obtaining an efficient stand assignment considering the stochastic nature of the airport environment and emissions reduction target of the modern air transportation industry. Furthermore, the presented methodology demonstrates how the same procedure of creating a stand assignment can help to identify an emissions mitigation potential. This paper illustrates the application of the presented methodology combined with simulation and demonstrates the impact of the application of Bayesian modeling and metaheuristic optimization for reduction of taxi-related emissions.
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from the article: "Abstract The way in which construction logistics is organised has considerable impact on production flow, transportation efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions and congestion, particularly in urban areas such as city centres. In cities such as London and Amsterdam municipalities have issued new legislation and stricter conditions for vehicles to be able to access cities and city centres in particular. Considerate clients, public as well private, have started developing tender policies to encourage contractors to reduce the environmental impact of construction projects. This paper reports on an ongoing research project applying and assessing developments in the field of construction logistics in the Netherlands. The cases include contractors and third party logistics providers applying consolidation centres and dedicated software solutions to increase transportation efficiency. The case show various results of JIT logistics management applied to urban construction projects leading to higher transportation efficiencies, and reduced environmental impact and increased production efficiency on site. The data collections included to-site en on-site observations, measurement and interviews. The research has shown considerable reductions of vehicles to deliver goods and to transport workers to site. In addition the research has shown increased production flow and less waste such as inventory, waiting and unnecessary motion on site."
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From a circular standpoint it is interesting to reuse as much as possible construction and demolition waste (CDW) into new building projects. In most cases CDW will not be directly reusable and will need to be processed and stored first. In order to turn this into a successful business case CDW will need to be reused on a large scale. In this paper we present the concept of a centralized and coordinated location in the City of Utrecht where construction and demolition waste is collected, sorted, worked, stored for reuse, or shipped elsewhere for further processing in renewed materials. This has expected advantages for the amount of material reuse, financial advantages for firms and clients, generating employability in the logistics and processing of materials, optimizing the transport and distribution of materials through the city, and thus the reduction of emissions and congestion. In the paper we explore the local facility of a Circular Hub, and the potential effects on circular reuse, and other effects within the City of Utrecht.
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Human behaviour change is necessary to meet targets set by the Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change. Restrictions and regulations put in place globally to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during 2020 have had a substantial impact on everyday life, including many carbon-intensive behaviours such as transportation. Changes to transportation behaviour may reduce carbon emissions. Behaviour change theory can offer perspective on the drivers and influences of behaviour and shape recommendations for how policy-makers can capitalise on any observed behaviour changes that may mitigate climate change. For this commentary, we aimed to describe changes in data relating to transportation behaviours concerning working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic across the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. We display these identified changes in a concept map, suggesting links between the changes in behaviour and levels of carbon emissions. We consider these changes in relation to a comprehensive and easy to understand model of behaviour, the Opportunity, Motivation Behaviour (COM-B) model, to understand the capabilities, opportunities and behaviours related to the observed behaviour changes and potential policy to mitigate climate change. There is now an opportunity for policy-makers to increase the likelihood of maintaining pro-environmental behaviour changes by providing opportunities, improving capabilities and maintaining motivation for these behaviours.
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Greenhouse gas emissions from air transport, and methods to calculate them, are notwell defined in the current literature. While calculating the direct emissions of CO2 is already causefor some debate, the contribution of other emissions and impacts – like nitrogen oxides (NOx),contrails, water vapour – to climate change still lacks a reliable metric. As aviation is the largestemitter of greenhouse gases within tourism, accurate estimates of carbon and non-carbon emissions are important. This paper presents some standardisation as well as general insights to assistresearchers assessing the impact of aviation on climate change in scenario studies or evaluatingmitigation policies. The IPCC introduced a radiative forcing index (RFI) to measure the role of aviation in climate change, which is in scenario studies or evaluations of policies often used as a kind ofconstant ‘equivalence factor’. The paper shows this to be inaccurate and proposes ways to accountfor both carbon and non-carbon climate impacts of air transport
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This paper examines a paradoxical issue in tourism's adaptation to climate change and emissions reduction demands. Operators increasingly take tourists to destinations threatened by climate change, with Antarctica and other polar regions as favourites and cruise ship and aircraft as main transport modes. The selling point is to see a destination before it disappears, a form of last chance tourism. This has been claimed to increase the environmental awareness of tourists and make them "ambassadors" for conservation and the visited destination. Antarctic cruise ship passengers tripled from 2000 to 2007. The paper finds that high levels of greenhouse gas emissions are created by cruise ship tourists in general, and especially high levels for those visiting the Antarctic, up to approximately eight times higher per capita and per day than average international tourism trips. A survey found no evidence for the hypothesis that the trips develop greater environmental awareness, change attitudes or encourage more sustainable future travel choices. Of the Antarctic cruise passengers surveyed, 59% felt that their travel did not impact on climate change; fewer than 7% had or might offset their emissions. Alternative opportunities for visitation to glacial/polar destinations that comply with the desire to reduce future emissions are discussed.
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Contrary to most sectors, to date the tourism and aviation industries have not managed to level off greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, effective mitigation through technological innovation or structural and behavioural change cannot be expected shortly. Airlines and tourism companies appear to use carbon offsetting as a last resort. However, offsetting is generally acknowledged as a second-best solution for mitigating emissions, after reducing energy use. This paper seeks to determine the mitigation potential of voluntary carbon offsetting by comparing public and industry awareness of climate change and aviation emissions, and attitudes to various mitigation measures with relevant online communication by 64 offset providers. Methods were a literature review and online content analyses. Overall, the gaps that were identified between awareness, attitude and actual behaviour are not bridged by provider communication. From this perspective, the mitigation potential of voluntary carbon offsetting for achieving reductions of tourism transport emissions is estimated as low. The same conclusion is reached by comparing carbon dioxide volumes of flight offsets with actual air travel emissions. Current sales of flight offsets compensate less than 1% of all aviation emissions.
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Densely populated areas are major sources of air, soil and water pollution. Agriculture, manufacturing, consumer households and road traffic all have their share. This is particularly true for the country featured in this paper: the Netherlands. Continuous pollution of the air and soil manifests itself as acification, decalcification and eutrofication. Biodiversity becomes lower and lower in nature areas. Biological farms are also under threat. In case of mobility, local air pollution may have a huge health impact. Effective policy is called for, after high courts blocked construction projects, because of foreseen building- and transport-related NOx emissions. EU law makers are after Dutch governments, because these favoured economics and politics over environmental and liveability concerns. But, people in the Netherlands are strongly divided. The latest provincial elections were dominated by environmental concerns, next to many socio-economic issues. NOx and CO2 emissions by passenger cars are in focus. Technical means and increasing fuel economy norms strongly reduced NOx emissions to a still too high level. A larger number of cars neutralized a technological reduction of CO2 emissions. The question is: What would be the impact of a drastic mandatory reduction in CO2, NOx, and PM10 emissions on car ownership and use in the Netherlands? The authors used literature, scenario analysis and simulation modelling to answer this question. Electric mobility could remove these emissions. Its full impact will only be achieved if the grid-mix, which is still dominated by fossil fuels, becomes green(er), which is a gradual, long-term, process. EVs compete with other consumers of electricity, as many other activities, such as heating, are also electrifying. With the current grid-mix, it is inevitable that the number of km per vehicle per year is reduced to reach the scenario targets (−25% resp. −50% CO2 emissions by cars). This calls for an individual mobility budget per car user.
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Emissions of greenhouse gases in many European countries are declining, and the European Union (EU) believes it is on track in achieving emission reductions as agreed upon in the Kyoto Agreement and the EU's more ambitious post-Kyoto climate policy. However, a number of recent publications indicate that emission reductions may also have been achieved because production has been shifted to other countries, and in particular China. If a consumption perspective is applied, emissions in industrialized countries are substantially higher, and may not have declined at all. Significantly, emissions from transports are omitted in consumption-based calculations. As all trade involves transport, mostly by cargo ship, but also by air, transports add considerably to overall emissions growth incurred in production shifts. Consequently, this article studies the role of transports in creating emissions of CO 2, based on the example of exports from China. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for global emission reductions and post-Kyoto negotiations.
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