What are effective policies to foster the transformation to next generation transport system?

The project maps alternative decarbonization strategies & technologies and provides rigorous policy evaluations to strengthen the evidence base for policymaking.

Policy briefs

The transport sector in deep decarbonization scenarios This policy brief presents the most pressing concerns for policy makers and industry identified by the climate sciences. It highlights different decarbonization pathways in line with the Paris goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C and in line with other sustainability objectives.
Designing Policies to Green Road Transportation This policy brief identifies effective policy instruments to address pervasive climate change, local pollution and congestion problems from road transportation. It offers an overview of existing policy instruments and the current state of empirical research regarding their impacts.
Current and future environmental performance of electric vehicles This policy brief describes the environmental burdens of current and future passenger cars based on a state-of-the-art Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The analysis includes battery or fuel cell electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and conventional vehicles with combustion engines.
Policies to enhance vehicle fleet modernization This policy brief discusses policies to accelerate clean car roll-out. It synthesizes evidence on the effectiveness of low emission zones and scrappage programs in improving air quality and human health.
Renewable synthetic fuels and their potential for climate change mitigation This policy brief evaluates the benefits and shortcomings of synthetic fuels from renewable electricity ("e-fuel") as a technology option to overcome decarbonization bottlenecks in road transportation and non-electric energy demand, in general.

Insights

**Can scrappage schemes that only support electric vehicles reduce emissions?** In the wake of the Covid-19 recession, policymakers provide subsidies to buy green cars conditional on scrapping old ones. We provide evidence on the controversial environmental effects of a hypothetical new German “Umweltprämie” targeting electric vehicles from a life cycle perspective.

**Different prices for urban and rural roads for fair mobility.** Pricing driving differently in urban and rural areas and earmarking revenues would not only address climate change, air pollution and congestion simultaneously, but it would also protect vulnerable groups and increase political support for price reforms.

**Afforestation instead of mitigation?** Are investments in forest protection and afforestation good alternatives to CO2 mitigation from private road transport? We show that their potential is limited and that priority should be given to sectors of the economy that are difficult to decarbonize.

**Public healthcare benefits from low emission zones recover policy costs.** 58 German metropolitan areas have low emission zones that deny high-polluting vehicles entry. Ever since their introduction, critics doubted the proportionality of the driving bans. We show that the reduced pharmaceutical expenditures for public health insurers alone recover a significant fraction of costs.

**Mobility transition scenarios for passenger transportation** Various strategies and technologies for achieving the decarbonization of the mobility sector are under consideration in the public debate. We show how model simulations are of substantial value for informing the debate about alternative mobility transformations in a systems context.

Szenario Explorer

eXplorer is a tool to evaluate a range of possible transport decarbonization pathways. Energy demand, vehicle sales, fleet composition and CO2 emissions are reported and compared across different scenarios based on transparent assumptions.

Carculator

carculator is an open-source, comprehensive and transparent life cycle assessment tool for passenger cars. It allows for an economic and environmental evaluation of different types of cars under several driving and energy supply scenarios.