Supporting climate strategies in transport and identifying appropriate action plans
When a country’s economy is developing rapidly, people travel more and more often, and companies increasingly move goods to their clients or transport materials they need for production. For policy-makers it is a challenge to regulate and steer a fast emerging transport sector. Economic growth needs to be organised efficiently and transport demand channeled into low-carbon modes such as buses, railways or non-motorised modes. Road vehicles need to be clean, preferably electric and powered by renewable electricity. Unnecessary trips and empty freight truck trips should be avoided at all costs.
The TraCS project is implemented by GIZ and funded by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).
The Advancing Transport Climate Strategies (TraCS) team helps policymakers in developing countries and emerging economies to align their mobility and transport sector action plans with their climate plans, the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
These contributions are essential components of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and key to global efforts to limit global warming to 1.5-2.0 degree °C above pre-industrialised levels. All signatory countries were asked to publish their contributions prior to the UNFCCC-Conference in Paris 2015 – and from 2020 will be asked to resubmit transparency reports every 2 years. This reinforces the momentum to improve data bases and emission quantification in the transport sector and, as a part of long-term decarbonisation strategy, transport and energy sector needs to be better coordinated and the share of renewable energies is significantly increased, e.g. through e-mobility or synthetic fuels based on renewable energy (Power-to-X or e-fuels).
The effectiveness of any transport decarbonisation strategy depends on the availability of reliable data. TraCS therefore focuses on capacity building, training activities and on fostering systems of collecting, evaluating and monitoring data. This data can then be used to assess the impacts of different policies and measures and is essential to increasing ambition for the next round of NDCs. TraCS cooperates with transport and environmental ministries in Kenya, Morocco and Vietnam, along with their subordinate authorities to facilitate NDC implementation in the transport sector. In 2020 and 2021, TraCS will further support transport and environment officials in Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Uganda in updating their NDCs and long-term strategies.
