How will cities achieve climate-friendly mobility?

Many European cities have ambitious long-term goals to reduce CO₂ emissions from mobility. How to actually achieve these goals, however, is less obvious. The 2050 CliMobCity project addresses the question of which packages of measures will lead to the desired reductions sufficiently quickly. The packages relate to the partner cities in the project. The measure packages should also promote economical land use.

Cities have increasingly come to realize that certain activities in their city cause a lot of CO2 emissions and air pollution and that mobility plays a large part in this. Making mobility more sustainable is therefore being taken up by many municipalities in their policies and policy plans. But, the climate goals of cities are often very ambitious: for example, becoming climate neutral in 2050, sometimes even earlier; "ambitious" in light of the current rate of CO₂ reduction. Municipalities have often not sufficiently tested whether their proposed policies actually get them to the long-term goal.

In the project 2050 Climate-friendly Mobility in Cities (2050 CliMobCity, https://www.interregeurope.eu/2050climobcity/) elaborates the major task of how cities can achieve their climate goals related to mobility through backcasting. This approach is applied to five cities in Europe: Almeria, Bydgoszcz, Leipzig, Plymouth and Thessaloniki.

Each of these cities defines packages of measures. The project tests whether these lead to the desired CO2 reduction. This involves not only mobility measures that lead to modal shift and clean and better technology, such as electrification and automation, but also spatial interventions, such as densification and mixing of functions, which stimulate climate-friendly mobility. When drawing up the measure packages, not only the effectiveness but also the efficiency of measures is considered.

The project is funded by the Interreg Europe program. The formal start of the project was in August 2019 and its duration is 4 years. In addition to the cities already mentioned, two knowledge institutions are participating in the project. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research which is particularly responsible for emission calculations. TU Delft contributes modeling and policy knowledge related to mobility and urban development and is also coordinator of the project.