Development of a novel framework for the design of transport policies to achieve environmental targets
Introduction
There is a consensus in the scientific community recognizing the effect of man-made emissions on climate and acknowledging the importance and urgency of tackling the climate change issue to avoid its catastrophic consequences. A delay in addressing the issue will result in costlier solutions that might not be as effective or even too late/ineffective. In 2007 the IPCC third working group published an assessment report on climate change mitigation (IPCC, 2007); however, an understanding of how to develop effective, acceptable and detailed policies has yet to be attained, as recent high-profile cases show, e.g. the failure of the first phase EU Emission Trading Scheme to cut emissions. Addressing such a complex problem requires the formulation of integrated policies that are coordinated and reciprocally reinforcing.
Targets on anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions are being set by national and international bodies to stabilise their atmospheric concentrations. The United Kingdom published the Climate Change Bill in March 2007 (DEFRA, 2007, DEFRA, 2008), introducing a long-term and binding target of a 60% reduction in the UK's carbon emissions by the year 2050 in comparison to their levels in 1990. There is a wide debate on the level at which these targets should be set, but once values are agreed, there are a number of possible alternative strategies (policies) to achieve them.
The precise nature and scope of policies designed to achieve environmental targets are necessarily geographically and culturally dependent given the variability of resources, of access to technology and of political constraints at different locations and times. For this reason, a one-for-all and static policy is unlikely to achieve the desired targets. On the contrary, the need for bespoke policies that are able to accommodate periodic revisions is now widely recognized. Even for a fixed time and place, the identification of a suite of alternative policies (rather than a single “optimal” one), together with clear indications of their trade-offs, is crucial to accommodate the diversity of the stakeholders’ preferences.
The introduction of a systematic approach for exploring alternative policies using a computational methodology will accelerate and improve the process of policy-making. Based on the Visioning and Backcasting Approach (Banister & Hickman, 2006a) a new framework for policy formulation is being developed and implemented as a prototype decision support system around a case study: the formulation and analysis of the policies required to achieve CO2 emission targets for the transport sector in the UK. The goal is to accelerate the task of policy-making and improve the effectiveness of the policies. The transport sector has been chosen for the case study because it is the second largest growing source of greenhouse emissions (IPCC, 2007).
The background to policy design and the backcasting methodology are discussed in Sections 2 Background to policy design, 3 Background on backcasting and the VIBAT project, respectively. Section 4 describes the proposed framework for policy formulation and justifies the development of the resulting decision support system. Details of the Decision Support System (DSS) are provided in Section 5. The results achieved in the development of the system are presented in Section 6 followed by a discussion of its limitations and proposed future work in Section 7. The conclusions for the work are presented in Section 8.
Section snippets
Policy and policy process
A policy is a principle or guideline for action in a specific everyday-world context (Pohl, 2008). Fig. 1 shows a model of the policy process and sets in context the Policy Design step, a step whereby the components of a policy are selected and the overall policy formulated.
The development of a successful policy is a manual, labour-intensive task involving many types of objectives and criteria for success. Policies may be related to technological, economic, political and social aspects. Some
Background on backcasting and the VIBAT project
The proposed framework and the decision support system make use of the normative scenario analysis known as the Visioning and Backcasting Approach (Banister & Hickman, 2006a). Section 3.1 provides a brief description of the backcasting approach and Section 3.2 introduces the specific terminology that is used throughout the rest of the paper.
Objectives of the proposed decision support system
The research objective is to develop a working prototype of a decision support system (DSS) to facilitate and speed up the design of transport policies in order to achieve environmental targets. The proposed techniques should be applicable to different targets (e.g. CO2, CH4, NOx emissions); in different sectors (e.g. industry, transport, energy generation); with different geographical scope (e.g. local, national, regional and international); and with integrated strategies (e.g. one that
Software architecture and implementation details
Fig. 7 illustrates the software architecture of the decision support system. The Java programming language (Java, 2008) has been chosen for the development because of its characteristics of platform independence, automatic memory management and access to an extensive library of freely available code and software. The program utilizes MySQL (2008), which is the most widely used open source relational database management system. The connection between the database and the core of the system is
Results
This section describes the results achieved so far in the development of the decision support system based on the proposed framework for policy formulation.
Current limitations
The decision support system has a number of limitations. They can be assembled into four groups:
- 1.
Data availability:
The VIBAT project report and its associated calculations were used as the primary source of data for the DSS. In cases where the data required was not explicitly given, the project reports were examined for implicit clues. If this examination did not yield satisfactory results, data was then generated through analysis of other available resources, and in the rest of the cases
Conclusions
The purpose of the research is to facilitate the design of policies and improve the resulting policies by using knowledge gained in other fields that address design issues, mainly from process design and synthesis. The focus has been directed towards the similarities between process and policy design with the specific aim of introducing a new framework and systematic thinking to the problem of policy formulation. A working prototype decision support system has been developed; it facilitates the
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Prof. David Banister at the Transport Studies Unit of the University of Oxford and Dr. Robin Hickman from Halcrow Group Ltd. for providing additional details regarding the VIBAT project and sharing their insights.
Glossary
- AHP
- Analytical Hierarchical Process
- API
- Application Programming Interface
- CBA
- Cost-Benefit Analysis
- CDP
- Criterium DecisionPlus
- CRUD
- Create, Read, Update and Delete
- DSS
- Decision Support System
- GIS
- Geographical Information Systems
- GraphViz
- Graph Visualization Software
- GUI
- Graphical User Interface
- ID
- Identifier
- JDBC
- Java Database Connectivity
- JPA
- Java Persistence API
- MCDA
- Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis techniques
- MCS
- Monte–Carlo Simulation
- SMART
- Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique
- VIBAT
- Visioning and Backcasting for UK
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