Its the climate, stupid

Good morning friends.

You can probably guess what today’s email is about. It’s not pretty news, and that’s with the PR spin on it. Time to stop talking. Time to start acting. And maybe, just maybe we may avoid the worst.

The strange thing about this is how, when I started my career 15 years ago, I was convinced that if we did the right things we could avoid what is now considered the best case scenario. Only to see us do nothing for 15 years, or at least nothing meaningful. Sorry for the downbeat assessment. But sometimes to do good things you need to feel awful about something. To the news.

James

The IPCC report shows that transport can have a noticable impact on climate change

The IPCC report on climate change is a sobering read, as just a selection of the media coverage demonstrates. The main report requests that you do not cite or distribute, which I will respect the wishes of. But when reading through it, a number of things struck out at me

• COVID-19 produced verifiable evidence that reducing travel demand has a noticeable impact on carbon emissions and NOx emissions, with the latter showing the highest reductions overall.

• The impacts of CO2 emissions from transport are experienced over the longer term. Simply, what we are emitting now we will not see the impact of for another 20-30 years.

• Having said that, there is a high confidence that emissions from fossil fuel combustion is having a significant impact at all timescales

All of this we already know. What is markedly different about this report is the messaging on in three ways:

• The climate science has evolved significantly over the last decade, to the point where we can now conclude that scientists underestimated the speed and scale of the impact of climate change

• Because of this, some of the impacts are already ‘baked in.’ There will be a global temperature rise of 1.5C whatever we do. Severe events like flooding, hotter summers, an ice-free Arctic and sea level rise will start to become the norm within the next 20 years.

• What we do now is damage limitation. If we think what is happening in the world is bad now, it will get worse. We need to take action to ensure that it is not even worse than worse.

What this means for transport planners

I must admit that I am still decoding the UK Government’s Transport Decarbonisation Plan. But we are (or at least should) be evidence-led. In our planning, we cannot just look at transport evidence, but evidence of change that impacts on transport and how transport impacts on the world. This evidence is stark and cannot be ignored. But the implications are complicated.

Let’s assume that reducing travel and making travel by low or zero carbon modes is the default policy choice and should be central to all policy. (Yes, I know that’s hard enough, but hear me out). How do we adapt transport systems to a world that will warm one way or another? The evidence indicates that:

• More spending will be needed on infrastructure maintenance as infrastructure buckles under more extreme weather.

• Some infrastructure will need to be lost to the elements. Not just sea level rise through managed retreat, but also river flooding and desertification. So ideas around abandoning infrastructure will need to come to the fore.

• Techniques may also need to be delivered to reduce the warming effect of infrastructure, such as greater tree cover or new surface materials.

In short, we must consider not only our ability to fight climate change, but how our transport infrastructure adapts to it being warmer and being hit with more extreme weather. We are not preventing a warming world, we are planning to live in one.

Visualisation of the Day

If you want something slightly more upbeat, some progress is being made, although it is painfully slow, and just in the EU. We can reduce emissions, but we just need to reduce them faster.

Source: Eurostat

If you do nothing else today, do this

Read the Summary of the IPCC Report for Policy Makers. Then act.