Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is clear that the scale of the challenge we face in decarbonising transport, as highlighted in this OECD report, will require a transformative level of behavioural and systems change. I was pleased to participate at the Climate Change Advisory Council's and OECD team's launch event on 5 October, alongside the new environmental director at the OECD and the chair of the advisory council. My Department engaged collaboratively with the OECD team over the past year in the preparation of its review.

The perspective in this report, that our transport system fosters growing car use and emissions by design, rightly reflects a systemic challenge that will require a systemic response. Our everyday transport and mobility patterns have been deeply embedded through a legacy of our past dispersed and low-density settlement patterns and policies and long-engrained mindsets that have established the primacy of private car usage over accessibility and more sustainable modes of travel. The report's key findings are clear. The most impactful and transformative measures we need to scale up and accelerate to achieve our highly ambitious emissions targets in transport are increased road space reallocation, the mainstreaming of on-demand shared services and enhanced communication strategies to encourage and support the required behavioural change in how we travel.

All of these measures are reflected in our ambitions as set out in the Government's national sustainable mobility policy, SMP, and through the work of our SMP leadership group and pathfinder programme, which I launched recently. The wellbeing lens approach that the OECD team has used in the report will be key to ensuring that policies to decarbonise transport are framed in terms of the wider benefits to be achieved in terms of quality of life and health benefits. While electrification of our car fleet will remain an integral part of how we will achieve our 2030 emissions targets, we cannot rely on technology alone. We need to move away from systems and policies that continue to engender car dependency and hinder the possibility of efficiently managing our public space and thereby diminish public wellbeing. We must instead provide quality access through more sustainable and healthy transport modes. The findings and approach set out in the report will greatly inform the direction of travel in the transport chapter of the next climate action plan and the further work in delivering the sustainable mobility action plan.

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