Living La Vida Low-Carb: A Low Carbon Society in Latin America. Estimating the Effects of Road Transport Management in Carbon Emissions Through a Visioning-Backcasting Model

Abstract: Carbon emissions have recently been put under the spotlight since it is widely accepted that global warming is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is the main component. One of the fastest rising sources of emissions from carbon emissions is the transport sector, with emissions often rising faster than the GDP growth rates of developing countries. The estimated share of carbon emissions coming from the developing world is currently low, however it is expected to rapidly increase in the next 30 years. It is more often that the developing countries are the most heavily affected from the externalities caused by the increase in global carbon emissions, hence there is an increasing interest in achieving a ‘low-carbon’ society in both the developed and the developing worlds. Using a visioning-backcasting approach and the ASIF formula, the carbon emissions for the four Latin American countries chosen for this study – Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico – have been estimated. Two images of the future have been created. This paper’s results show that for both images envisioned for the backcast, the target reduction of 50 per cent of carbon emissions by 2050 or bring it back to levels of the base year of 2000 can be achieved through a mixture of policy packages targeting road transport management.