6. Co-benefits of Urban Transport

Climate co-benefits are often not the primary drivers for choosing policies and investments in the transportation sector. However, the growing awareness of the costs of climate change, the importance of the sector in the global greenhouse gas emissions profile and the growing opportunities provided by the emerging climate instruments have opened up a more holistic paradigm in assessing transportation investments. With growing negative externalities from the transport sector, limited availability of funds and long-term impacts of transport investments, there is an urgent need to maximize benefits through the integration of multiple objectives including climate concerns in the assessment of policies and projects. It is often assumed that applying the co-benefits approach to the transport sector is difficult, needs a lot of resources and often is not straightforward. This chapter tries to break this myth. It establishes a case for quantifying co-benefits and presents a specific case study on the Chennai Metro Project. It shows how quantifying multiple co-benefits from transport projects could be simple yet effective in understanding the economic viability, and long-term impacts of the project. The adoption of the co-benefits approach in the assessment of transport investments aims to reveal a wider range of costs and benefits of the alternatives which are currently not captured in existing assessment approaches. In doing so, a clearer picture of the impacts of the different alternatives is generated and thus better investment decisions can be made.