Sustainable mobility must combine freedom of movement and environmental responsibility

Mobility is a question of individual freedom: everyone has the right to move around. Whether willingly chosen or put up with, it plays a crucial role in accessing work, education, care services, and everyday essentials. The immobility forced upon us during the Covid-19 health crisis highlighted the fundamental need to get out and about. Mobility fosters social bonding and opens up opportunities for discovering other cultures. It is even a factor for peace. Furthermore, it must be accessible to as many people as possible, under acceptable conditions in terms of services and cost.

Moreover, a significant increase in mobility across the globe is expected: global transport (measured in passenger kilometres) is expected to double, car ownership rates to increase by 60%, and demand for passenger and freight aviation to triple by 2070^(a).

At the same time, the climate emergency is accelerating. Almost 10 years ago, in October 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that we only had ten years left to reverse the trend. Today, the human-induced climate change is already impacting many extreme weather and climate phenomena in every region across the globe. Yet as it currently stands, the mobility of goods and people is incompatible with global climate, environmental, and health challenges. So this model needs to change… fast.

Transport is indeed responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions: in 2020 it accounted for 24% of global emissions^(b).

There are major implications for health, too: according to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2019 outdoor air pollution caused the premature deaths of 4.2 million people worldwide^(c). As for road accidents, every year they cause the deaths of approximately 1.19 million people^(d).

To strike a balance between these imperatives – the right to mobility and the climate and health emergencies – we believe mobility stakeholders should focus on two areas. On the one hand, it involves of course proposing comprehensive, sustainable mobility solutions: vehicles, mobility infrastructure and systems. On the other, users themselves must be made aware of the consequences of their mobility choices by providing them with indicators on the socio-environmental outcomes – carbon footprint, amount of energy used, repercussions on rare earth metals, social impacts when purchasing goods, etc. – in addition to those already available (travel times, journey break points). In short, there needs to be a framework that allows each and everyone to make their own, responsible choices.

Footnotes:

^aInternational Energy Agency, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

^b https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

^chttps://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health

^dhttps://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_1767