Mitigation of CO2 emissions from the road passenger transport sector in Bahrain

Abstract

There is much optimism that the 2015 Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention will yield an agreement on mitigation of climate change, to become effective in 2020. In this context, Bahrain represents a developing country with insufficient data to assess mitigation opportunities: its per capita carbon emissions rank among the world's highest, yet there has been no research on the reduction potential of its rapidly growing transport sector. We examine this reduction potential and the costs of various mitigation measures and, further, explore barriers and the view of policymakers and experts. Potential benefits of combined mitigation scenarios are also identified based on their acceptability. We adopt a modified participatory method to develop the scenarios, using the Long-range Energy Alternative Planning (LEAP) modeling system, and find that an integrated policy approach can deliver a 23% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, costing 108 United States dollars per avoided metric tonne, with politically acceptable scenarios.Better performance, however, would require less acceptable approaches. These findings are 2 significant for decision making in Bahrain and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries; national target preparation and the setting of fuel economy standards should be begun promptly. We offer lessons to other developing countries on the timely regulation of technical specifications and numbers of passenger vehicles. Participatory approaches to the assessment of mitigation measures can advance environmentally effective, economically feasible and politically acceptable scenarios. The global community can use these results to provide necessary technical and financial assistance to developing countries.

Integrated approach to the assessment of CO2e-mitigation measures for the road passenger transport sector in Bahrain

“…This method of scenario packaging achieves several benefits. First, the cost per reduced Mt of CO 2 e emissions can decrease significantly, as evidenced in Alsabbagh et al [123]. Second, the maximum potential of emissions reductions is identifiable.…”

“…Policymakers and experts performed the selection of both the evaluation criteria and their weighting ( Table 3). The scores of performance related to the economic and environmental quantitative criteria were derived from our calculations in a previous work [123], whereas policymakers, experts, and groups of the general public assigned the scores of performance related to the social, political, and other qualitative criteria.…”

“…The results from previous work related to cost-effectiveness analysis and environmental assessment [123] were used in this study as quantitative inputs to the economic and environmental criteria in the AHP model. A linear scoring function was used for the environmental and economic criteria with scores ranging from 1 9 (worst best performance) for compatibility " T normalisation, the principal eigenvector was calculated, as explained by Saaty [137].…”

Social Learning and the Mitigation of Transport CO2 Emissions

“…Several assumptions were used to build mitigation scenarios. A total of nine mitigation scenarios were explored (Table 2) [35]. …”

“…Almost identical questionnaires that were used for the participative decision-making model applied in earlier studies [34,35] were applied for this study. This enabled comparisons to be made between the results of the deliberative and participative models.…”