Exploration

In the initial exploration session, the stakeholders focused on understanding the challenges and opportunities inherent in the regional energy transition and sustainable mobility. With a diverse range of voices and expertise, the stakeholders generated numerous valuable ideas.

Through facilitated discussions, stakeholders validated and refined their ideas, collaboratively selecting priorities. These priorities were then reframed into practical “how might we” statements, serving as a clear and relevant prompt. This structured approach not only directed subsequent expert insights but also facilitated the development of concrete action plans, ensuring our exploration translated into meaningful results.

The exploration and insights have been grouped into the following areas:

Public and Political Will

How Might We

Connect top-down decisions with bottom up engagement?

Incentivize behaviour to mobilise public and private sectors?

Accelerate policy making?

Match political and public will?

Driven by key questions on aligning top-down decisions with grassroots engagement, one theme becomes clear when discussing public and political will:

Corporate leadership in emerging market sectors helps to create critical public and political support.

Emphasising the importance of climate target adoption, political will becomes a key factor in accelerating our regional climate targets and ambitions to occur before 2050.

During discussions, stakeholders advocate for prioritising the decarbonisation of the mobility sector in political agendas. Paving the way with realistic and achievable policies, stakeholders also believe COP28 should nationally determine these goals.

The challenge of harmonising political and public will, quickly becomes apparent when highlighting the role of individual decisions in collective climate action, particularly in mobility choices. While we often fixate on the lack of resources and the high cost, human behavioural change will ultimately play a critical and important role in climate action.

Regional governments who actively navigate the energy transition, will need to showcase initiatives that harmonise commercial and climate interests. By demonstrating a commitment to cultivate private sector efforts to advance new energy technologies – regional governments send an important signal to the public overall of where public interest and public policies intersect.

Making Sustainability Accessible

How Might We

Make accessibility (to new energy) more convenient?

Make tech affordable and convenient?

Incentivize the development of new technologies needed and induce authorities to introduce them faster.

A key topic of making sustainability accessible was to make it accessible across all demographics, and for the majority of the population – not simply for those that can afford it.

The challenge is that sustainable alternatives tend to be more expensive to produce, and since they are in shorter supply, economics tend to push their prices further above their less-sustainable counterparts. This can be seen in both consumer and industrial goods as well as services.

Businesses internalise their externalities, and the consumer is often left paying the price. A dress made by a brand that pays its employees a living wage and uses sustainably sourced organic cotton will inevitably cost more than its fast-fashion counterpart. But what about cars? While greener products will become more affordable as they become more widely available and in higher demand than their unsustainable counterparts, this is not currently the case.

Range anxiety remains one of the biggest setbacks in the widespread adoption of sustainable individual mobility options. Policymakers can help address this by working with the private sector to deploy advanced charging infrastructure to eliminate range anxiety and concerns over time to recharge.

Cost issues remain a barrier for making sustainability more accessible. Improving accessibility to sustainable mobility for the majority, not just the privileged few, emerges as a paramount goal. To address this, incentivizing the development and adoption of new technologies becomes imperative, particularly in the realms of multimodal tech and charging infrastructure.

While the vision is for greener products to become more affordable with increased availability and demand, the current reality begs a closer examination of pricing dynamics.

The imperative to encourage consumers, coupled with a call for more impactful actions, rings loud in the quest to make sustainability accessible. As we delve into this domain, these insights shape our strategies to bridge the gap between sustainability and affordability.

Developing The Required Capacity

How Might We

Prepare, act, deliver, and be accountable for the mobility commitment in the next 5 years?

Involve all stakeholders to skill up, build up, and save the infrastructure?

Empower youth and locals to make responsible consumption decisions?

Ensure that sustainability is a core value at each point on the value chain?

A strategic discussion around developing capacity was spurred by key questions on mobility commitments, stakeholder involvement, and sustainability values. In the context of the conversation, capacity includes the knowledge, skills, infrastructure, and resources necessary to achieve sustainable mobility.

Technology’s role in fostering multimodal mobility and sustainable industries emerges as pivotal. Stakeholders agree it is the key to creating new industries and new jobs in the future.

The current lack of integrated multimodal transportation options in the region presents a challenge. While buses and trains are designed for sharing, automobiles – the largest contributors to the mobility carbon footprint – are not. Discussions on how this can be considered in future planning followed with a focus on EV charging and infrastructure.

Regional EV charging infrastructure is currently lagging behind others, both in availability as well as in the time taken to charge a vehicle. One stakeholder noted, “If Switzerland is a 10, Dubai is a 3.”

Range anxiety has been broadly solved with the most recent generations of vehicles offering ranges of 500kms or more, but charging times in the hours remain a sore point, particularly for professional, commercial and industrial drivers such as taxi and delivery drivers, and freight haulers.

Despite regional EV charging challenges, the opportunity to leverage petrochemical energy distribution expertise for green energy emerged. While storage and distribution of green energy is a challenge, the region’s capability in petrochemical energy affords an opportunity to advance as a global leader in new, sustainable mobility energies.

A core tenet of sustainable mobility involves capacity-building to educate a climate-literate youth population that understands the connection between their actions and how they impact climate. Understanding that future generations will inherit a challenging climate situation, we must equip them with the necessary knowledge and tools to become climate changemakers.

Additional Insights

Carbon capture and carbon accounting are important to incentivise carbon abatement, but the ideal scenario would be to avoid carbon emissions entirely.

For all the work we do to improve individual mobility, heavy freight vehicles contribute high levels of pollution in urban environments. A solution for locally emissions-free urban mobility is key.

COP28 is a necessary platform to discuss opportunities and to debate climate targets, but they must result in actions.