Klimakalender Einzelansicht

07.08.2017 - 08.08.2017
Konferenz

Symposium “Climate Change and Transport

The transport sector accounts for over one quarter of global CO2 emissions. It is one of the few industrial sectors where an increase in CO2 emissions are seen, especially from car use, road freight and aviation. It is known that apart from new technologies, policy-making and behavioural changes are needed in order to change this state of affairs. There is thus a pressing case for making the transport sector more climate-friendly and, inter alia, more sustainable.

There is widespread agreement to reduce CO2 emissions from transport by a minimum of 50% at the latest by 2050. This goal, in turn, is putting professionals, enterprises and other stakeholders in the transport sector, as well funding bodies and banks supporting projects in this field, under a lot of pressure. They all need to work harder towards reducing emissions caused by transport, by implementing solutions at the short, medium and long term. On the other hand, climate change is known to directly affect transport infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, sea ports) with significant financial costs and development implications. Adequate attention to these impacts is needed, so as to ensure that transport investments will deliver their intended benefits

The above state of affairs, combined with the Paris Agreement led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to reduce CO2 emissions from the transport sector, illustrates the need for a better understanding of how transport contributes to climate change and how climate change affects the transport sector, and for the identification of processes, methods and tools which may help to cope with both sides of the coin. There is also a perceived need to showcase successful examples of how to make the transport sector more resilient to climate change, how to cope with the various problems transport poses in terms of the release of greenhouse gases, and how the transport sector can be part of the solutions towards addressing climate change as a whole.