If, At First, The Idea is Not Absurd, Then There is No Hope For It: Towards 15 MtC in the UK Transport Sector.

This paper examines the possibilities of reducing transport carbon dioxide emissions in the UK by 60 per cent by 2030 using a modified scenario building and backcasting approach. It examines a range of policy measures (behavioural and technological), assessing how they can be effectively combined to achieve the required level of emissions reduction. The intention is to evaluate whether such an ambitious target is feasible, identify the main problems (including the transition costs), and the main decision points over the 30-year time horizon. This paper outlines the first stages of the research, providing: An introduction to futures studies, including a review of forecasting, scenario building and backcasting approaches; An assessment of the UK transport sector's contribution to climate change and global warming, and; Setting targets for 2030, forecasting the business as usual situation for all forms of transport in the UK, and assessing the scale of change in terms of achieving the emissions reductions. The benefits of scenario building and backcasting are that innovative packages of policy measures can be developed to address emissions reduction targets. It allows trend-breaking analysis, by highlighting the policy and planning choices to be made by identifying those key stakeholders that should be included in the process, and by making an assessment of the main decision points that have to be made (the step changes). It also provides a longer-term background against which more detailed analysis can take place.

Scientific Research about Climate Change Mitigation in Transport : A critical review

Peer reviewedPostprin

Book review: Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl (2008) Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil

Having read this book, one is left with a feeling that the important issues raised should have been at the forefront of policy debates for many decades, not just now. The basic argument is that transport must move away from its almost complete dependence of oil to alternative energy sources. Transport consumes nearly 60% of all oil (2005), and it is in a very vulnerable position as it is dependent on this one source, a potentially unstable set of supply conditions, volatile prices, and substantial increases in demand. This is not a good business strategy, and the risks and uncertainties seem to have grown substantially in the last two years with oil prices rising by nearly three times to around $150 per barrel

Policy on Sustainable Transport in England: The Case of High Speed 2

The achievement of sustainable transport is often a clearly stated objective of government policy, but in England there is no National Sustainable Transport Strategy (NSTS). This paper outlines the nature of sustainable transport arguing for a strategic approach that takes account of the means to reduce travel through substitution and shorter trips, as well as making best use of all modes and reducing reliance on carbon-based energy sources. It reviews the recent austerity phase of UK transport policy (2010-2015) where revenue support has been cut, but capital expenditure has increased, and it comments on the difficulties of making decisions on large scale transport infrastructure projects in the absence of a NSTS. The recent policy statements and initiatives on transport and sustainability are covered, looking backwards and forwards. It then takes the case of High Speed 2 (HS2) and identifies five main narratives in the debates over the arguments in support of this huge investment. It seems that sustainable transport has not been a central part of that debate, and there is a need to reframe the discussion on HS2, as part of a NSTS

Introduction to the Special Section on Theoretical Perspectives on Climate Change Mitigation in Transport

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Assessing the reality—Transport and land use planning to achieve sustainability

JTLU vol 5, no 3, pp 1-14 (2012)This paper takes a historical perspective on how cities have become less sustainable in terms of transport, but it will argue that many positive changes have taken place even before the current concerns over CO2 and oil. There seem to be many more opportunities for further change through the encouragement of high-quality city-based lifestyles that do not require high levels of carbon-based mobility. But it is in the newly emerging “megacities” that the main problems occur, as there is a discontinuity between the slow growing, stable, and well-structured cities of the west and the rapidly growing, unstable, and unstructured cities of the east

Cross-Modal Health State Estimation

Individuals create and consume more diverse data about themselves today than any time in history. Sources of this data include wearable devices, images, social media, geospatial information and more. A tremendous opportunity rests within cross-modal data analysis that leverages existing domain knowledge methods to understand and guide human health. Especially in chronic diseases, current medical practice uses a combination of sparse hospital based biological metrics (blood tests, expensive imaging, etc.) to understand the evolving health status of an individual. Future health systems must integrate data created at the individual level to better understand health status perpetually, especially in a cybernetic framework. In this work we fuse multiple user created and open source data streams along with established biomedical domain knowledge to give two types of quantitative state estimates of cardiovascular health. First, we use wearable devices to calculate cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), a known quantitative leading predictor of heart disease which is not routinely collected in clinical settings. Second, we estimate inherent genetic traits, living environmental risks, circadian rhythm, and biological metrics from a diverse dataset. Our experimental results on 24 subjects demonstrate how multi-modal data can provide personalized health insight. Understanding the dynamic nature of health status will pave the way for better health based recommendation engines, better clinical decision making and positive lifestyle changes.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2018 Conference - Brave New Ideas, Seoul, Korea, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5665-7/18/1