The impacts of long-term CO2 objectives on short-term transportation trends in the European Union

In 2001, the Sustainable Development Strategy was formulated by the European Union and, for the first time, a framework aimed at incorporating methods of sustainable development into European policy-making was adopted. In 2004, the European Union launched a review of the strategy and it has since been strengthened in a renewed strategy launched in 2006. Central to the renewed strategy is a commitment to cap global temperature rises to 2°C over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. The EU has recently agreed on a target of reducing greenhouse gases by between 60 and 80% by 2050 in order to achieve this goal. There has been little research on how the achievement of such a target would impact on European transportation trends. Given the new policy reality, this research develops projections simulating the impact of such a long-term target on road transportation growth in the European Union, and assesses how much of specific interim transport targets are implied by the presence of this long-term target. The projections are based on harmonised energy-economy simulations of the IMACLIM-R and POLES models. They cover the EU-27 disaggregated into 23 zones and track emissions of CO 2 for a range of vehicles and technologies. The results indicate that while mobility trends are only marginally altered by the presence of a stringent climate change mitigation policy, energy efficiency in transport is improved significantly. However, we also find that the presence of an overarching climate change objective is not enough to guarantee meeting a number of interim transportation sub-targets.