Climate impact of transportation A model comparison

Bastien Girod (), Detlef Vuuren, Maria Grahn, Alban Kitous, Son Kim and Page Kyle

Climatic Change, 2013, vol. 118, issue 3, 595-608

Abstract: Transportation contributes to a significant and rising share of global energy use and GHG emissions. Therefore modeling future travel demand, its fuel use, and resulting CO 2 emission is highly relevant for climate change mitigation. In this study we compare the baseline projections for global service demand (passenger-kilometers, ton-kilometers), fuel use, and CO 2 emissions of five different global transport models using harmonized input assumptions on income and population. For four models we also evaluate the impact of a carbon tax. All models project a steep increase in service demand over the century. Technology change is important for limiting energy consumption and CO 2 emissions, the study also shows that in order to stabilise or even decrease emissions radical changes would be required. While all models project liquid fossil fuels dominating up to 2050, they differ regarding the use of alternative fuels (natural gas, hydrogen, biofuels, and electricity), because of different fuel price projections. The carbon tax of 200 USD/tCO 2 in 2050 stabilizes or reverses global emission growth in all models. Besides common findings many differences in the model assumptions and projections indicate room for further understanding long-term trends and uncertainty in future transport systems. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-012-0663-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:118:y:2013:i:3:p:595-608

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0663-6

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().