IMSA chief lays out vision for a sustainable future

The sustainability agenda is now firmly on the table for most Western governments, and a good few Eastern ones. The pace of change has been so great, however, that it makes it all the more harder to try and predict where we will be in another 15 years. Will we be suffocating in a cloud of emissions, drowning in a warm soup of rising sea-levels and sewage, or purring along in biofuel (or even better, hydrogen) vehicles?

Vision
One man who is not afraid to lay out his vision for the future of sustainable mobility is Wouter van Dieren, Dutch sustainability guru and chairman of the Institute for Environment and System Analysis (IMSA) in Amsterdam.

In the first of three exclusive articles for MindsinMotion.net, van Dieren shares his thoughts on sustainable mobility in 2020.

Incentives
“By 2020, we will not only have introduced a kind of kilometre levy on road transport, albeit far too late, but we will be limiting mobility itself. This will initially be done by means of incentives. People will receive a considerable premium for moving to live near where they work, for example,” he says.

Encouraging people to ditch their own transport altogether and to use public transport has been an on-going battle for governments at all levels across Europe. Van Dieren believes that by 2020, the focus will not just be on penalising people for using their car, but equally on rewarding them for using alternatives.“

Your travel card will calculate how much CO2 emissions you are saving when you make use of public transport. The savings will be added to your CO2 credit card each month, in the form of Eco Smiles or Clean Air Miles. Your total will not only increase whenever you choose public transport, but also because of the increasing financial value of CO2. Therefore, you will receive additional income by making more environmentally aware choices. The economy will also benefit as CO2 trade is, and will be, a growing commodity,” says van Dieren.

Few alternatives
He accepts that some people may dismiss his suggestions as impractical, but he believes that authorities will have few alternatives to consider, as the enormous economic losses resulting from an over-congested infrastructure will greatly outweigh the cost of an incentive system.

Global
“And by then, CO2 credits will be a global asset, to be earned and traded not just locally by individuals, but internationally between governments,” he says.