Our joint statement suggests three main avenues of effort for the scientific and technological community in supporting human needs, maintaining the environment, and moving toward sustainable human consumption patterns. I want to speak on the second of these-the need to actively generate new knowledge. To do so, we need to change science itself, to go beyond what we already know and expand the world's capacity system for discovering new things.
The transportation of goods and people represents roughly 30% of overall energy expenditures and, is the source of nearly one quarter of world greenhouse gas emissions. A big part of the responsibility in this, belongs with road transport, with 80% of the energy consumed in the transport sector. And, within this, private vehicle use represents 60% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions coming from road transport.The road transport sector is thus at the root of a wide range of environmental and health externalities -GHG emissions, local pollution, noise, accidents and road safety risks, congestion (with associated stress and time costs) and, the sealing of productive land for roads and associated infrastructures. This leads to reflection within and around the automobile industry, on the conception and commercialisation of new products that will reduce these negative externalities -including, among others, the ambitious targets of GHG emissions for 2050 : a reduction of 60% in GHG emissions for the transport sector compared with 1990 (European Commission 2011).There are several other mutations in road vehicle markets that will equally impact on the innovation strategy of actors in the « car » ecosystem. These include :• Increasing urbanisation that will tend to accentuate negative impacts of car use. The social costs of congestion, for example, are estimated to rise by 50% between now and 2050, with a monetary value of several billion euros per year, if nothing is done to slow the flux of car traffic. What mobility solutions might be proposed, to respond to individual mobility needs while nonetheless proposing products or mobility services with as low a social cost as possible ?• Increases in average incomes in the most populous countries of the world (China, India, Indonesia, regions of Africa) will lead to greatly increased demand for cars and car use.This increasing access to individual mobility will come at what environmental cost ?• Several major changes in mobility behaviour patterns and « lifestyles » can be anticipated for coming years, linked on the one hand to habits and expectations of the new « connected » generations and, on the other hand to the growing « senior » (elderly) populations. One might imagine a changing demande for safer and more « connected »
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