Sustainable travel behaviour and the widespread impacts on the local economy

Statistics show that unsustainable travel behaviour and global greenhouse gas emissions are growing and due to the perceived indispensable nature of personal travel, shifts to more sustainable modes remain a challenge. Automobility supports sustained local economic growth but also raises issues around safety, health, road fatalities, traffic and congestion, and detrimental environmental impacts. This article addresses the issue of sustainable mobility by investigating how to increase sustainable travel choices and, where this is not possible, ensure existing travel choices and patterns are as environmentally friendly as possible. Existing soft initiatives aimed at increasing sustainable travel behaviour fail to fully acknowledge that travel decisions are made at the individual level and that tailored strategies would be more effective at targeting distinct behavioural patterns. Influencing changes in travel behaviour at the local level demonstrates significant potential where individual behaviour can be influenced if appropriate support at the system level is in place and complies with the needs of individuals. This article demonstrates that, in doing so, this will simultaneously address other areas, such as accessibility, employability, health and sustainable growth, crucial to the establishment and survival of automobility by both supporting local economic growth and achieving reductions in carbon emissions

Regulating cars and buses in cities: The case of pedestrianisation in Oxford

Debates about whether traffic regulations that limit car use will enhance or hinder a particular urban economy are complex and often emotive. The present article considers evidence from the implementation of a radical traffic restraint and pedestrianisation scheme in Oxford in 1999. The most important achievement was a 17% reduction in car trips to the centre, which did not affect overall visitor numbers. The local economy did though experience a period of difficult trading around the time of implementation

Stakeholder dynamics in the EU forest energy sector: key issues to manage and ways forward

EU forest biomass demand is increasing rapidly under policy stimuli, as biofuels are important for EU utilities to reach EU 2020 renewables goal. The import of large amounts will be required, but stakeholders have sustainability concerns. Utilities are adopting self-regulatory certification schemes to reduce stakeholder pressures but the interplay between these efforts, stakeholder and policy dynamics, and business risks is not well understood. This study uses literature, interviews, and a survey of 120 stakeholders to delineate influential actors in the discourse, principal concerns, and ways to ameliorate opposition and risk. The work finds many actors opposed to forest energy systems, and shows how critique is directed toward a nexus of industry and policymakers. It also indicates that critics have an ascendant status and can catalyze changes in policy and business practice in response to their concerns. Key concerns involve carbon, biodiversity, and deforestation; however, it is found that self-governance systems do not yet incorporate metrics to meet emerging expectations. The study concludes that efforts must deliver robust track records of strong ecological, climate, and social performance for forest energy supply chains to allay concerns - as distinct from just sustainability certification'. Work must include increased efforts to source woody biomass from the EU-27(+) to engender trust in forest energy actors, and scientific studies to delineate strong' versus weak' carbon and temporal carbon' performance for forest energy systems. This also suggests a need to delineate silvicultural regimes that facilitate the management of forest energy supply chains for improved carbon performance. (c) 2014 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Lt