ICT as a mode of transport to reduce the climate change: A case study in Colombo city area

Abstract

Climate change is one of the greatest environmental issues the world is facing at the moment. Most scholars have already pointed out that climate change would bring potentially catastrophic impacts for natural and human communities alike in the very near future. Transport is currently responsible for 13% of all world greenhouse gas emissions, and 23% of the global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion are transport related (ADB, 2009). Moreover, transport related CO2 emissions are expected to increase 57% worldwide in the period of 2005 to 2030 (ADB, 2009). In transportation also, road traffic is the main contributor to the climatic change (Berntsen, 2005), where emissions from ships and planes are not even covered in Kyoto Protocol. In USA, while vehicles emit 27% of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions, a further 9% is emitted from vehicle manufacture and motor fuel production (Cambridge Systematics, 2011). In European Union area, transport is the only sector to see an increase in emissions of greenhouse gases (CICERO). Therefore, the transportation community is being challenged to develop strategies to contribute toward efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many have pointed out that demand management strategy is one of key strategies to reduce the transportation’s contribution to green house gases (Cambridge Systematics, 2011: US Department of Transportation and etc). On the other hand, Forum for the Future of UK has pointed out that Information Communication Technology (ICT)-use has great potential to reduce the amount we travel. Further, developments of ICTs and increase in ICT use have created a new travel behavior (Kim et al, 2009).

This study looked at the Colombo City Area (CCA), which is the hub for the commercial and main administrative activities in Sri Lanka. The first challenge of the study was to find out the number of vehicles that can be reduced by using the ICT as a transport mode equivalent to other modes such as car, bus, van, rail and etc with the involvement of traffic counts, questionnaire surveys and interviews with passengers etc. Here, inward traffic to CCA and road transportation was only considered. Simultaneously, two more surveys were carried out to calculate the load factor of each transport mode and to find out the manufacturing year of the vehicles. Further, a baseline GHGs database was prepared, which was backed by existing literature reviews. This database provides the amount of emissions produced by each transport mode in the means of manufacturing year, speed, load and etc. Then, this study further reviewed to determine whether are there any support for lessening the emissions from the secondary effects such as deterioration of congestion, accidents, delay time and etc occurring due to the decline of number of vehicles. Ultimately, all these data were used to predict the real benefits by using ICT as a transport mode to reduce the climatic change in the CCA.