̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - fuel emissions

On yer bike!

sj387 — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 09:58:33 +0000

Motorised transport is the fastest-rising cause of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions and there’s a strong imperative to address this by moving towards a low-carbon transport system. Moreover, as Woodcock, from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research, explained: “It’s possible to benefit public health at the same time.”

But which approaches to achieving a low-carbon transport system would provide the biggest health benefits?

“We can think about the problem in two ways,” he said. “We can evaluate the impacts of an intervention such as new cycling infrastructure, or we can develop scenarios around what a healthy, low-carbon future transport system would look like, and then we think about how to achieve major changes in how people travel. We often see quite small effects from the interventions happening now, whereas potentially large things are possible.”

“Cycling could have a big role to play,” he said. “But to achieve this you’d have to start thinking about changes in land use to reduce trip distances, and cultural and infrastructural changes to make cycling an everyday mass activity for short- and medium-length trips.”

Woodcock has led the development of an Integrated Transport and Health Impact Modelling (ITHIM) tool, which models the health impacts of travel behaviours on both population health and greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’re seeing different effects in different populations,” said Woodcock. “In health terms, switching from driving to cycling consistently shows a net benefit, and the greatest benefit comes from getting older people more active. However, a complicated web of other problems arises. In some contexts, such as inner London, cyclists seem to face notably higher injury risk than users of other travel modes,” he said. “They also breathe harder so are inhaling more air pollution, which is bad for health.But on the other hand, they are not in a car putting other road users at injury risk or producing pollution for everyone else. We need this model to tell us which is the more important effect.”

There are also rebound effects to consider. “If I sell my car and buy a bike, I’ll have money left over, and where do I then spend that money?” he asked. “I may end up causing greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else, and it’s complicated to account for these second-order factors.”

ITHIM has now been taken up in California to evaluate transport plans in the San Francisco Bay area. It showed that a shift from driving to walking and cycling on short trips reduced the burden of cardiovascular disease and diabetes by 14% and reduced emissions by around 14%. By contrast, low-carbon driving reduced emissions by 33.5% but cardiorespiratory disease burden by less than 1%.

̽��ֱ��results are feeding into new policy in which a combination of active transport and low-carbon driving could meet legislative emissions mandates. Meanwhile, working with the Greater London Authority, Woodcock is also evaluating the impact of achieving the Mayor’s cycling targets and has also separately modelled the impacts of the Barclay’s Cycle Hire Scheme.

With funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Medical Research Council, Woodcock is leading two additional projects to address the problem of how to achieve the necessary behaviour change. By focusing on the development of cycling cultures through social learning and social influence, and by understanding the unintended outcomes that policies might bring about, these projects are attempting a different approach from those used in traditional transport modelling.

“Our research brings out a potential good news story,” he added. “Health benefits link transport and environment problems, and we need to be sure of the best route to achieving the biggest benefits.”

CEDAR is a partnership between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the ̽��ֱ�� of East Anglia and Medical Research Council Units in Cambridge. Visit www.cedar.iph.cam.ac.uk for more information.

With governments around the world under increasing pressure to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, transport systems are under scrutiny. Dr James Woodcock has introduced another factor into the equation: population health.

Health benefits link transport and environment problems, and we need to be sure of the best route to achieving the biggest benefits

James Woodcock

Amir Kuckovic

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What impact will new technology have on tackling emissions?

sj387 — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 09:14:01 +0000

Computational models provide unparalleled insight into current and future demand for water, land and energy, and the impact these demands have on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the environment. What if we could also take into account the fast pace at which new technologies are evolving? This is the aim of a new project in the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy.

Dr Jean-Francois Mercure, who leads the research, asserts that building this factor into models will help understanding of the degree to which improvements in energy-consuming technologies and their adoption can help governments reduce emissions: “Technology comes to life through innovation, timely investments and policy incentives, and so it’s important to include technology diffusion and its pace in energy modelling.

“However, this is challenging and most models today attempt to calculate cost-optimal technology roadmaps based on current technology, which is not necessarily likely to happen, and which disregard the process by which new technology regimes come to existence, but also how old technologies endure.”

Technological change occurs constantly, either following innovations in industrial systems or through evolutions of behaviours, such as in the adoption of electric cars. Earlier this year, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Mercure began work on a computational modelling system that takes into account the profile of technology transitions in the past to project how new transitions could arise in the future.

To do so, he is collaborating with environmental scientists at the Tyndall Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of East Anglia and at the Open ̽��ֱ��, policy advisors and researchers at the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change and the Committee for Climate Change, and applied economists at Cambridge Econometrics.

Mercure believes that this will be the first time an energy–economy–environment model at the global level simultaneously considers technology diffusion in all sectors of energy use alongside natural resource constraints and the interaction between sectors.

“If the global power sector is to decarbonise by 2050 without there being significant economic costs then all countries must make a contribution to the development of renewable technologies,” he added.

“Take as an example the solar photovoltaic industry. Large investments in Germany enabled production costs of firms in China to decline significantly in recent years, which could not have occurred without such investments. Technology sectors typically face a classic vicious circle: established technologies thrive because they are established, and emerging technologies see barriers to their diffusion due to the lock-in of established technologies. This will be the case unless an emerging technology is a radical improvement over established technologies, or it benefits from strong policy support and investment. This applies to many other sectors such as mobility technologies, industry and household appliances.”

Professor Douglas Crawford-Brown, Director of 4CMR, is excited by the prospects of this new modelling: “Dr Mercure’s work sits nicely at the intersection of aggregated economic sectors and the decisions of individual investors. He is plotting an intermediate ground in which both theories of investor behaviour and empirical econometrics allow for much greater insights into energy supply and demand.”

Mercure’s recent research has focused on the global electricity sector, which currently emits 38% of global fuel combustion emissions mostly through the use of fossil fuels. ̽��ֱ��new project will extend the model to all major energy-consuming sectors, including transport, industry (e.g. steel, cement) and buildings (heating, appliances), to model different scenarios of support policies for technological change.

“We want to be able to answer questions about the impact of policy changes on global emissions. Badly coordinated roadmaps of technological change can lead to increases in GHG emissions and so it’s important to know which types of policies will incentivise efficient emissions reductions in order to avoid dangerous climate change.”

New research seeks to take account of the fast pace at which technology is evolving in understanding how to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

Technology comes to life through innovation, timely investments and policy incentives

Jean-Francois Mercure

Paul Krueger

Car2Go Electric Car Sharing

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