Part Four / What We’ve Done About It

4.16 The Challenge of Transport

All online sources accessed on

  1. As people’s incomes rise, we tend to travel further Schäfer, A., and Victor, D. G., ‘The future mobility of the world population’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice , 34 (3), 2000: 171–205, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0965-8564(98)00071-8.

  2. A global study … of road-vehicle kilometres Broken, J., et al., ‘Global and country inventory of road passenger and freight transportation: fuel consumption and emissions of air pollutants in year 2000’, Transportation Research Record , Journal of the Transportation Research Board No. 2011, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, DC., 2007. 127–36 (figures for 2000), https://doi.org/10.3141/2011-14.

  3. a quarter of the global population could have … taken a flight Gössling, S., and Humpe, A., ‘The global scale, distribution and growth of aviation: implications for climate change’, Global Environmental Change, 65, 2011: Article 102194, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102194. This is a theoretical maximum. If at least one person took more than one flight, this number decreases. As some take multiple flights, a much lower percentage of the world’s population actually flew in 2018.

    Travelling on a long-haul first-class flight ‘International rail’ in this context is powered significantly by the very low-carbon electricity grid in France.

  4. international aviation and shipping together contribute … as Japan Global Carbon Atlas, ‘Fossil fuel emissions, 2020’, http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions; Global Carbon Project, Global Carbon Budget 2021, 4 November 2021, https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/21/files/GCP_CarbonBudget_2021.pdf. This figure is based on the 2.9 per cent of global CO2 emitted by ‘bunkers’, representing ‘international aviation and shipping’, which is around 1 gigatonne of CO2 – a similar amount to that emitted by Japan in 2020.

    many years away from the technological solutions Bows-Larkin, A., ‘All adrift: aviation, shipping and climate change policy’, Climate Policy, 15 (6), 2015: 681–702, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2014.965125.

    more warming than they would if released on the ground Gössling, S., ‘Risks, resilience, and pathways to sustainable aviation: a Covid-19 perspective’, Journal of Air Transport Management, 89, 2020: Article 101933, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2020.101933.