Oliver Heidrich
Newcastle University
I graduated in Germany as a fully qualified Civil Engineer and completed a PhD in Environmental Management and Business Psychology (CEG and the School of Biology and Psychology) at Newcastle University in 2006. I develop new approaches to model and manage climate change adaptation, mitigation, natural resources and material flows using e.g. life cycle assessment, industrial ecology and standardised systems e.g. 9001, 18001 and 14001 in urban environments. I aim to provide researchers and decision makers a system-scale understanding of the inter-relationships between resource mapping and resource use in cities. For this I consider climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and technologies in the built environment. My research, consultancy and publications feed directly into my teaching bringing expertise into the classroom. I lead modules, teach and conduct the associated administration of Higher Education (HE) Programs for UG, PG and doctoral students. I research and develop new theories for urban areas (cities) and climate change adaptation and mitigation by considering resource models, life cycle assessment and costing, industrial ecology principles and standardised management systems.
Transport relies strongly on fossil fuels and accounted for 27 % of final energy use (IPCC, 2014). There is an urgent need to concentrate on cities and their sustainable transport strategies for dealing with the challenges (and opportunities) climate change may bring. Today 54% of the world’s population live in urban areas which is anticipated to increase to 66% by the year 2050 (United Nations, 2015).
Across the world many cities publish climate change mitigation strategies and other measures to support the wide spread uptake of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and this paper investigates the effectiveness of these strategies in UK cities, the provision of infrastructures and discusses the related initiatives that should help to reduce carbon emissions. We show that 13 out of 30 UK cities mention EV in their strategies. Analysing EV registrations and the EV infrastructures that is provided by cities we found that there is no statistical difference in the number of charging points or EVs between the cities that have EVs as part of their climate change mitigation strategy and those that do not.
Although noting the UK purchased more EVs in 2014 than in the total purchased in the previous five years added together (SMMT, 2015), with a further increase of EV ownership of 90% in the first three quarters of 2015, based on data released by the DfT (2015). Nevertheless to support the country in attaining the target that the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the 1990 baseline (AoP, 2008) the Committee for Climate Change (CCC, 2015) estimated that by 2030 some 60% of all newly registered vehicle need to be EV. This means that the EV ownership needs to grow year on year by 45% between 2015 and 2030 (Neaimeh et al., 2015).
We demonstrate that local strategies are failing in achieving the much needed step change. Investigating the emission factors we show that EV’s, when compared to an efficient Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), might not be the magic bullet to achieve the needed reductions by 2020 or 2027, but as improvements in current ICE vehicles decelerate it will be necessary to switch to EVs to achieve reduction beyond 2027. This will allow time for cities to improve their strategies and implement the necessary infrastructure needed to support the efforts at the national scale driving the uptake of EVs forward.
References
The Climate Change Act.
CCC (2015) Sectoral scenarios for the Fifth Carbon Budget- Technical report. London, UK
DfT (2015) All licensed vehicles and new registrations (VEH01)
IPCC (2014) Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III
Neaimeh, et al (2015) Rapid Charge Network (RCN)- Activity 6: Study- Final Report. Newcastle, UK.
SMMT (2015) New car registration - 7 January 2015 (data for December and full year 2014). London, UK.
United Nations (2015) World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision. New York, USA.
• Infrastructure systems, the built environment, and smart and connected infrastructure , • Public policy and governance , • Sustainable urban systems
