Transport & Mobility Systems that Protect Health and Climate
It is widely acknowledged that a changing climate will have a significant negative impact on human health. Tackling transport emissions will have significant positive impacts on air pollution. But the benefits of transforming mobility to sustainable, low carbon paradigms spam across the wide notion of planetary health on which our civilization depends and in which human health and the health of our planet are inextricably linked.
Whether it is curbing emissions, reducing deaths and injuries in road crashes, enabling healthy lifestyles with walking and cycling, supporting mental health with reclaimed streets for community life or better integrating urban spatial and transport planning for place-making; the nexus across transport-air pollution-health is a multiplier.
SLOCAT strives to collaborate beyond the transport community, to showcase mutually-reinforcing results across this nexus.
Collaboration with the Health and Climate Network
SLOCAT was invited to serve as a Steering Group Member of the Health Climate Network – an alliance of organisations, including Wellcome, working to put positive health outcomes at the centre of responses to the climate crisis. The Network advocates for evidence-based policy solutions that save lives and improve global health.
Our collaboration aims to:
- Identifying actionable and pragmatic messages for actors engaged in international processes on climate change and sustainability.
- Disseminate evidence-informed, consensus-based data, advocacy and recommendations to a global network.
- Broaden HCN’s “coalition of the willing” with multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder cooperation beyond the health community.
SLOCAT and HCN have created an infographic on how health, climate and transport are connected. The infographic details transport impacts affecting health and climate, transport trends improving public health, and post-pandemic uncertainties with health implications. It also highlights actions for delivering transport systems that protect health and climate.
For practitioners looking for practical tools to implement healthy transport systems, SLOCAT and the Health Climate Network have produced a knowledge base (and user guide) to help prioritise packages of transport policies that contribute to health and climate objectives.
The knowledge base complements existing resources from other Health Climate Network members – including the World Health Organization’s Health economic assessment tool (HEAT) for cycling and walking and the Global Climate and Health Alliance’s Healthy NDCs Scorecard – to assess policy options and outcomes for health, transport and climate.
SLOCAT and the Health Climate Network organised the workshop, ‘Aligning Efforts to COP27 and Beyond’ to investigate ways to increase ambition in the updated Nationally Determined Contributions and Long-Term Strategies of the Paris Agreement. The discussion also helped define the network’s engagement strategies for 2022-2023. Workshop Presentation