The Challenge of Tracking Transport-Related CO2 Emissions

CO2 and air pollution can be reduced significantly by improving cities’ transportation systems, but quantifying those reductions can be difficult.

This article originally appeared on Embarq’s blog The City Fix.

As transportation demand continues to rise at unprecedented rates, the need to compare alternative transport policies and their impacts on both CO2 emissions and local air pollution is becoming more and more critical. However, the challenge of quantifying these impacts has often hindered transparent and well-informed decision making.

To help address this barrier, EMBARQ/WRI has just released a new publication entitled “Measuring the Invisible: Quantifying Emissions Reductions from Transport Solutions”. The new report is composed of a series of case studies that examine how three developing country cities (Queretaro, Mexico, Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Hanoi, Vietnam) can quantify emissions reductions from transport interventions. Importantly, we found that in each case, there is a large potential to reduce transport-related CO2 and air pollutant emissions at the city level through implementation of smarter transportation policy.

We hope that this research contributes to efforts to develop reliable and cost-effective approaches for estimating greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions from various transport interventions.

Click on the links below to read the full reports:

• Queretaro case study
• Porto Alegre case study
• Hanoi case study

Also, you can watch a video of a presentation I gave on this project at last year’s Transportation Research Board annual meeting:

Learn more about Embarq’s work on sustainable transport here.