The recent adoption of the 2030 SDGs and the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change have set a clearer long-term goals to improve human well-being, and have added a new level of urgency to implementing long-sought but little-realized steps toward these ends. Crucially, country-level Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) provide initial blueprints for national climate action, including in the transport sector, and the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA) transport initiatives can be a key part of efforts to implement the NDCs. Yet these various initiatives alone will not be sufficient to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement.
Thus, in the desired roadmap directions, and limit the lock-in effects of a high-carbon business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. It is in this spirit that the following list of 20 transport quick win actions have been proposed for implementation at scale in the pre-2020 period, which are coherent with the global roadmap described above:
These pre-2020 actions span policy, regulatory and operational solutions for both human mobility and freight movement, thus providing a balanced toolbox to ramp up needed actions across transport themes and modes, and structuring efforts in three directions:
Prompting decisions to expand the implementation of solutions which have already proven their efficiency at a smaller scale or with a less ambitious scope.
Halting existing practices and/or regulations that run in directions opposite to what is required to set the global transport sector on a lower-carbon trajectory
Initiating without delay and at relatively low cost, actions or decisions preparatory to full implementation of a global decarbonisation roadmap.
These pre-2020 actions span policy, regulatory and operational solutions for both human mobility and freight movement, thus providing a balanced toolbox to ramp up needed actions across transport themes and modes, and structuring efforts in three directions:
- Prompting decisions to expand the implementation of solutions which have already proven their efficiency at a smaller scale or with a less ambitious scope.
- Halting existing practices and/or regulations that run in directions opposite to what is required to set the global transport sector on a lower-carbon trajectory
- Initiating without delay and at relatively low cost, actions or decisions preparatory to full implementation of a global decarbonization roadmap
The Quick Wins on Transport, Sustainable Development and Climate Change report describes a course of immediate bold and ambitious action that will kick-start the transformation of the transport sector in the desired roadmap directions, and limit the lock-in effects of a high-carbon business-as-usual (BAU) scenario.