Skip to main content

New ITF Projections for urban mobility in China, India, Latin America

Transport in the urban centres of emerging economies is becoming a major battleground for combating climate change. Projections presented by ITF Economist Aimée Aguilar Jaber during the COP 20 climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru indicate that big cities in China, India and Latin America with over 500,000 inhabitants will more than double their share of world passenger transport emissions by 2050 to 20 per cent, from nine per cent in 2010, if current urban transport policies remain unchanged. 38 pe
December 19, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
Transport in the urban centres of emerging economies is becoming a major battleground for combating climate change.

Projections presented by ITF Economist Aimée Aguilar Jaber during the COP 20 climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru indicate that big cities in China, India and Latin America with over 500,000 inhabitants will more than double their share of world passenger transport emissions by 2050 to 20 per cent, from nine per cent in 2010, if current urban transport policies remain unchanged. 38 per cent of the total growth in world surface transport passenger emissions to 2050 will come from big cities in these three regions in such a business-as-usual scenario.

These new projections, released by ITF for the event, highlight a critical choice for policy-makers: whether to pursue urbanisation based on public transport or on private transport with cars and two wheelers. Sustained policies that promote either private or public urban transport lead to very different mobility futures, as projections for modal shares in 2050 show (see charts, left).

These alternative scenarios have profound impacts for the contribution of urban transport to global emissions that are detailed in the 2015 ITF Transport Outlook, of which chapter 4 containing the projections for China, India and Latin America was pre-released for the COP20 conference.

The projections were presented by ITF Economist Aimée Aguilar Jaber during the Side Event "Mitigation Potential of Urban Sustainable Low-Carbon Transport: Priorities for INDCs, NAMAs and SDGs" on 4 December, jointly organised by the 5466 Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and ITF.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Connected Places Catapult: let's get holistic
    June 17, 2019
    Two UK organisations - Transport Systems Catapult and Future Cities - have merged to form Connected Places Catapult. Helen Wylde explains what this new start is designed to achieve Changing towns and cities, changing transportation…changing the world – it’s all too easy to sound idealistic. But however sensible a pessimistic outlook might be, it in no way mitigates the absolute urgency of our need to succeed. The coming together of Transport Systems Catapult and Future Cities is significant because
  • Lima to invest in subway lines
    October 24, 2014
    Peru will invest nearly US$10 billion in the construction of Lima metro lines No. 3 and 4, private investment promotion agency ProInversión forecast at BNamericas 5th South America Infrastructure Summit. ProInversión recently awarded a pre-investment studies contract for line No. 3 and in coming the months will launch pre-investment and feasibility studies for line No. 4. "These are projects that, given similar characteristics to line No. 2 – more than 30 kilometres long and all built underground – s
  • EVs: Time for a rethink
    December 14, 2021
    Given a growing body of evidence that EVs are not the clean, green machines they are made out to be, Andrew Bunn suggests they can only be part of the puzzle – not the answer to environmental problems
  • New US fuel efficiency standards would cost over US$65 billion in lost revenue
    April 17, 2012
    Friday’s proposal by the Obama Administration to increase fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks to an average 54.5 miles per gallon (4.32 litres/100 km) between 2017 and 2025 would result in the loss of more than $65 billion in federal funding for state and local highway, bridge and transit improvements, an analysis by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) shows.