There may be no other sector where sustainable development and greenhouse gas mitigation are as closely aligned as in the transportation sector. However, some transportation-sector characteristics inhibit its ability to obtain climate funding (for example, difficulty in determining the business-as-usual baseline; uncertainties in estimating the emissions reductions from mitigation measures; high up-front costs). This paper argues that Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) provide a new framework that can potentially overcome these difficulties and achieve substantial reductions in transportation emissions in developing countries. Three groups of NAMAs are discussed.
Unilateral NAMAs: autonomous actions taken by developing countries to achieve emissions reductions without outside support or financing.
Supported NAMAs: developing-country actions undertaken with financial or other support from developed-country parties; they also represent developing countries’ contribution to climate mitigation.
Credit-generating NAMAs: actions that could be partially or fully credited for sale in the global carbon market after an agreed-upon crediting baseline has been reached.
The authors identify supported NAMAs as being potentially the most viable of the three options, in relation to the transport sector, and propose a number of principles to promote effective adoption of supported transportation NAMAs. These include:
development of low-carbon transportation plans for countries and metropolitan regions
creation of a transportation 'window' in the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund with dedicated, sector-specific funding and evaluation criteria
planning and capacity building funding
funding bundles of projects and policies
accepting uncertainty – there will be considerable uncertainty in modelling emissions reductions and developing baselines, especially for some of the most transformational projects.
It is asserted that this proposed framework shows how NAMA financing can be leveraged to help direct more substantial financial resources from public and private investment toward lower-carbon transportation choices. It is argued that the benefits for climate may be large, but the local impacts may be even larger, as improved travel choices foster economic development, better quality of life and reduced air pollution. The paper concludes that climate funding cannot be the only driver, but it can help catalyse the transformation to an environmentally and economically sustainable transportation system.