The Future of Sustainable Mobility: analysing the critical interplay between markets, technologies and policies in the decarbonisation of transport

As ever more countries seek to address the challenges of anthropogenic climate change, particular attention is being directed at personal mobility. Transport is now the largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the only sector where they continue to rise. Despite recent efforts to decarbonise transport, however, this sector remains over 95% dependent on fossil fuels.

The world’s major carmakers continue to operate largely as they have been doing for decades, under market pressures that have created path dependency properties around the principal products demanded by consumers. These products continue to be dominated by the internal combustion engine. Even though these companies have considerable capabilities for technological innovation, these market conditions have limited the level of investment in these new technologies, given uncertainty over market conditions for these new products. Given this, there is a particular role for policymakers to play, in helping to create the right conditions for market growth of low-emissions products and technologies. This needs action to develop both the supply and demand sides.

Decarbonisation efforts have tended to take two simultaneous directions. First, alternative fuels compatible with current engine technologies – biofuels – are being promoted in many countries around the world. Second, new fuel sources are being developed which require different engine technologies. The growth of biofuels in the last two decades has been enabled not only by its compatibility with existing engines, but also the fact that the technology to produce biofuels, at least those derived from crops, is well-known and long established. Alternative engine technologies have, therefore, had greater technological hurdles to overcome to bring them to market. Government policies therefore have important roles to play, to promote research and development on the supply side, but also to promote uptake on the demand side. In recent years, however, especially in the context of the global economic crisis, governments have been unable or unwilling to devote resources to policies which are sufficiently robust and with adequate long-term stability to promote new technologies, products and markets.

The aim of this project, therefore, is to analyse the critical interplay between markets, technologies and policies in the decarbonisation of transport.

potential supervisors to agree a specific focus aligned with interests and experience, subject only to the supervisory capacity available in Nottingham Business School. You will be joining a growing group of researchers and doctoral students working on sustainable mobility. This group of researchers possess a wide range of methodological supervision capacity including both quantitative and qualitative methods, scenario analysis and dynamic modelling. In addition, the group members are from multi-cultural background which not only helps widen our research perspectives but also benefits from international collaboration. As a result, we are comfortable with research proposals adopting either quantitative or qualitative methods, or indeed a mixed-method approach. We would expect potential applicants to demonstrate in their proposals a combination of critical thinking, through a critical literature review, and rigorous methodology, through a clear description of planned research strategy and methods.

So how might applicants develop this initial brief further? Markets can be defined by technology (eg biofuels, ultra-low emissions vehicles, etc), by geography (individual countries or regions, for example – but also even individual cities and local efforts to decarbonise transport, considering supply-side but also demand-side factors. Technologies can be considered individually (such as biofuels, plug-in technologies, etc), but also how different technologies may interact (including the evolution of different engine and fuel
technologies), which compete on emerging markets as companies pursue their own strategies. Further, how do these factors evolve over time? For example, in the long term, will governments’ efforts to promote ultra-low and zero-emissions vehicles, in time, eliminate demand for biofuels? The experience of biofuels policy development has revealed the dangers for policymakers of not taking sufficient account of end-consumers’ preferences for new technologies. Is there, therefore, a particular need to embed consumer preferences in the supply-side development of new technologies and products?

These are given here as an indicative list of potential research projects, rather than a fixed and definitive list. We very much welcome enquiries from anybody who wishes to discuss their ideas around the future of sustainable mobility.