France Stratégie and the French General Inspection for the Environment and Sustainable Development (Inspection générale de l’environnement et du développement durable; IGEDD) have jointly carried out a foresight study on transport and mobility up to the years 2040 and 2060, with a view to meeting the carbon neutrality target that France has set for itself.
Within this framework, seven scenarios were produced, incorporating both the mobility of persons and goods; five scenarios do not assume the objective of carbon neutrality as given from the outset and are, therefore, more exploratory (forecasting scenarios); two so-called ‘backcasting’ scenarios operate on the assumption that the carbon neutrality of transport must be achieved.
Dominique Auverlot and Alain Sauvant, who coordinated this exercise, detail its characteristics here (approach, methodology etc.) and the major lessons to be drawn from the seven scenarios. These range from one that is a little more optimistic than the trend scenario to others that are very ambitious, either in terms of voluntary self-restriction or technological solutions. It emerges that only the two backcasting scenarios, which incorporate carbon neutrality into the very way that they were framed, actually achieve it. Armed with this finding and the various costings arrived at in this foresight exercise, the authors also present nine key messages aimed at political decision-makers, so that they are equipped with the essential elements for setting the transport sector (by road, air and sea) and mobility more generally on the path to genuine decarbonization. In a second article published in this issue, they round off their analysis by focussing on the most relevant technologies for fostering this decarbonization of transport.
