Abstract: Reaching the Paris Agreement goal requires transformative systemic change in all main emitting sectors of the economy, including freight transport. Nonetheless, current national strategies and efforts to mitigate this sub-sector’s emissions are far from sufficient. This is at least partially due to a mismatch between the required decarbonization transformations and existing policies.
This misalignment can be mostly explained by two factors: (1) existing research rarely captures the integrated view of all transformations required to fully decarbonize the sector and instead focuses mostly on technological solutions; (2) current policies do not adequately reflect the complexity of the transformations.
Through this research, we developed a novel approach to improve policy analyses and help transport policy planners boost decarbonization ambition and action at national level, based on an innovative analytical structure to gather in-country expert opinions. The framework structures the analysis of policy instruments in the light of all stakeholder-oriented areas of transformations for the sector and associated barriers as well as enablers of sectoral deep decarbonization. This approach was then applied by national research teams in eleven countries: Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa and the United States to test its use and relevance. This paper introduces this method and presents cross-country comparison results around a specific area of sectoral transformations to illustrate how such an approach can benefit national ambition and action.