I fear that this feeling is only too familiar to the authors of Climate Change 2022 – Mitigation of Climate Change the latest in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s cycle of reports setting out the scientific consensus on how the climate is changing, why and what can be done about it.

Launched on 4 April 2022, the IPPC report that:

limiting warming to around 1.5°C (the level agreed by global governments to avoid locking in the worst impacts of climate change) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43% by 2030

So we have just 3 years left to stop emissions from transport rising before they need to come down very sharply and very quickly. That of course, just isn’t happening.

Cutting through the anodyne language of a text approved by 197 governments, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres laid into governments and business alike for

a litany of broken climate promises” amounting to “a file of shame…empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unviable world”, adding, simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.

The new report reviews thousands of scientific papers to identify the actions that have the highest chance of avoiding this catastrophe. Its headline conclusion is that we need rapid, deep and sustained emissions reductions across all areas of the economy. A radical change to how we plan, design, build and operate transport systems is unavoidable if we are serious about climate change. The IPPC warns that without a change in trajectory, global emissions from the transport sector will actually increase by 50% by 2050.

One glimmer of hope amidst the gloom is that for transport professionals, much of the research reviewed by the IPPC, pushes us towards solutions that are already reasonably well understood or at least have influential champions, research budgets and pilot progammes in train.

Cities need to become more compact, with road space given over to walking and cycling rather than cars. The choice architecture that we all face needs to nudge us to low carbon mobility or reduce the need to travel altogether, to which end we must continue to exploit the advances in digital connectivity that have been made during the pandemic. Construction and maintenance activity to maintain infrastructure networks needs to embrace circular economy principles and systematically drive out emissions from all stages of the value chain. Cars need to shift rapidly to battery electric vehicles, something that is gathering pace in the UK. The electricity that powers them though must come from clean sources. One of the starkest messages in the report is that emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure look set to carry the world well beyond the 510 gigatonnes of CO2 that can be emitted to stay on a pathway to Net Zero that will keep warming to 1.5C or below.

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem or the limits to what any one organisation or person can achieve. The new CIHT 5-year strategy has climate action as a core theme, committing the Institution to support members to drive change. We are overhauling the help we provide members to develop the skills they need to make a difference and are working with sister organisations on sector level challenges such as standardising carbon measurement and reporting. We are running policy projects on areas as diverse as blue/green infrastructure and Electric Vehicle charging infrastructure. We are putting carbon at the heart of much of our events programme. I can’t honestly say that given the scale of the threat I think this enough – and I’d like to hear more from members on what else we could or should be doing – but one thing we all need to take away from the IPPC analysis is that it is time to act – and we must all play our part.

Want to discuss this further, why not contact me directly at andrew.crudgington@ciht.org.uk or join the debate on CIHT Connect.

Andrew Crudgington, Climate Change Associate