It has gone quite unnoticed that in the recently concluded United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the 27th Conference of Parties (COP 27), the Presidency of Egypt in a pre-COP statement has identified transport ‘as an issue of particular importance’ for reducing heat trapping carbon emissions and energy impacts. It has highlighted that the transport sector carbon emissions mitigation is an under-prioritised climate agenda despite the warning from the IPCC report of 2022 that transport is the fastest growing source of carbon emissions.
Despite this global attention leading to a lot of conversation in the side events of the COP 27, the original plan of organising a transport day to get the global transport community to make high level commitments to develop roadmaps, funding and governance mechanisms for solutions for the sector, did not quite take off.
Yet, it is of particular significance that the ‘Long-Term Low-Carbon Development (LT-LEDS) Strategy’ that was put out by India in COP 27, has established the need for an integrated, efficient and inclusive low-carbon transport system. It has asked for significant expansion of low-carbon options across transportation modes for passenger and freight mobility. The emphasis is on improved fuel efficiency, phased transition to cleaner fuels, modal shift towards public and less polluting modes of transport, electrification across multiple modes, phased adoption of cleaner fuels—including hydrogen, demand side management, integration of transport with urban planning, multi-modal connectivity, and enhanced railway capacity.
The question is how soon will this get translated into measurable and verifiable milestones to reduce energy and emissions impacts of transport and mobility in India.
Explosive growth
Locally and globally transport is turning out to be a “hard to abate” sector. Even in India, energy guzzling is expected to explode with motorisation and increased demand for movement of people and goods. With its growing economy, India has rapidly expanded its highways, railways, metros, airports and ports to meet this ever-increasing demand. Estimates show that this has led to fivefold increase in both energy use and emission from transport over the last three decades.
India’s LT-LEDS has stated that the emissions from the road transportation sector are fossil fuel driven and the road transport sector accounts for about 87 per cent of passenger traffic and 60 per cent of freight traffic movement. The internal combustion engine vehicles have more than doubled the fuel consumption and related GHG emissions from the transport sector.
According to the 2021 International Transport Forum report on India, passenger transport activity in India has already more than tripled from 2000 to 2020. Car ownership has almost doubled in the past ten years. Dependence on personal vehicles is growing as the formal public transport systems are limited to a few large Indian cities and even those are losing ridership and revenue.
People will travel more and longer distances adding to emissions and energy consumption. A 2015 UNEP study for India has warned that the passenger kilometre is expected to more than triple by 2050 with increased city size and income. Without adequate public transport, private transport will overtake public transport mode share by 2040.
International Energy Agency’s (IEA) India Energy Outlook 2021 has projected a doubling of the demand for oil for road transport by 2040, largely due to the addition of passenger cars and trucks to the vehicle stock between 2019 and 2040. India is expected to see the largest increase in demand for oil by 2040. Over half of the growth will be fuelled by freight transport.
Moreover, with cities becoming bigger and richer, travel distances and trip generation are also increasing, increasing passenger transport demand by billions of passenger kilometres. This demand is not going to settle soon.
Whiter is the solution?
Unless low carbon and low energy intensity options across all transportation modes for passenger and freight mobility are implemented along with stringent fuel efficiency norms for vehicles, this energy guzzling cannot be easily tamed.
So far, India has implemented fuel efficiency standards only for passenger cars. But even these norms are too lenient to make an impact. An evaluation by IEA shows that the industry has comfortably achieved this target at the current level of technology and fleet-wide fuel efficiency. Only a small improvement is needed to meet the Stage 2 standard in 2022–23. While these standards need significant tightening, other modes also need to be brought within the fold soon.
Yet, India has a much bigger opportunity in its sizeabale share of walking cycling and public transport trips and high density and mixed-use urban forms, to avert the energy crisis. Most Indians still walk, cycle or use public transport. Census 2011 shows that almost 71 per cent of the work trips are by walking, cycling, and multi-modal public transport systems.
Even though several progressive transport sector policies and funding strategies have evolved to reform the transport sector solutions, the change on ground is still limited in scale. India’s advantage may get seriously eroded if active policies are not pursued to build and modernise public transport, expand walking and cycling infrastructure and pursue transit-oriented development in cities with multi-modal systems, along with vehicle-restraint measures to limit automobile dependence.
The author is Executive Director, Research and Advocacy, Centre for Science and Environment
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