Abstract
Climate co-benefits are often not the primary drivers for choosing policies and investments in the transportation sector. However, the growing awareness of the costs of climate change, the importance of the sector in the global greenhouse gas emissions profile and the growing opportunities provided by the emerging climate instruments have opened up a more holistic paradigm in assessing transportation investments. With growing negative externalities from the transport sector, limited availability of funds and long-term impacts of transport investments, there is an urgent need to maximize benefits through the integration of multiple objectives including climate concerns in the assessment of policies and projects. It is often assumed that applying the co-benefits approach to the transport sector is difficult, needs a lot of resources and often is not straightforward. This chapter tries to break this myth. It establishes a case for quantifying co-benefits and presents a specific case study on the Chennai Metro Project. It shows how quantifying multiple co-benefits from transport projects could be simple yet effective in understanding the economic viability, and long-term impacts of the project. The adoption of the co-benefits approach in the assessment of transport investments aims to reveal a wider range of costs and benefits of the alternatives which are currently not captured in existing assessment approaches. In doing so, a clearer picture of the impacts of the different alternatives is generated and thus better investment decisions can be made.
Notes
- 1.
Such as the use of a multi-criteria analysis utilizing weights for different impacts as provided by affected stakeholders.
- 2.
Revealed passenger behaviour indicates that people are generally willing to walk up to about 5 min to access a station, which indicates that they may typically walk up to a little over 400 metres at an average walking pace of 5 km/h. Reducing passengers’ perception of the walk-in time by 5% could increase walk-in demand by 10% because it expands the area from which people perceive they are within their 5 min limit.
- 3.
- 4.
Using aircount calculator for Delhi air pollution—http://aircounts.com/aircounts.html.
- 5.
The author was part of the modelling team for the World Bank study on integration of short-lived climate pollutants in World Bank activities (World Bank 2013).
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Gota, S., Mejia, A. (2018). Co-benefits of Urban Transport. In: Sethi, M., Puppim de Oliveira, J. (eds) Mainstreaming Climate Co-Benefits in Indian Cities. Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5816-5_6
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