Cycling Lab

Column

My country, the Netherlands, intends to reduce carbon emis­sions with at least 20% by 2020. Part of this will be ‘off set’ to developing countries by buy­ing carbon credits. Our airline company KLM already voluntary started to compensate 10% of its emissions. I approached them with the idea to compensate by investing in cycling in their des­tination cities. To me it seemed obvious that an airline company can best compensate by invest­ing in zero-emission transport in the cities where the airplanes emit, particularly one from a typical cycling country (30% of metropolitan trips by bike). KLM liked the idea but they needed official CDM certified carbon credits, gold standard. And these don’t exist for cycling.

In mitigating climate change there are two strategies; one is to reduce existing carbon emis­sions and the other is to prevent potential carbon emissions to be released. The transport sec­tor focuses on reducing exist­ing emissions by fuel-efficient engines fed by non-fossil fuels, the only existing transport CDMs are for bus systems.

Cycling avoids emissions and permits a prevention strategy. If people have no choice but public transport, motorcycles or cars, it results in carbon emissions. By getting the choice to cycle people avoid increase of carbon emissions. This avoidance can be attributed to the cycling prac­tice as a carbon capture, a ‘sink’, a carbon value to be used for investing in cycling provisions.

Providing for cycling is not real­ly difficult; it basically comes to enabling the use of public roads without getting killed. What keeps Governments from making investments in bike lanes along busy roads and bridges over physical barriers? The answer probably is that cyclists often are poor, and provisions for the poor easily succumb as political priority. But what if these poor cyclists happen to represent carbon values? Cyclists become politically interesting once the City Government can sell cycling credits to an airline company and so generate funding for their investments in cycling provi­sions. Then cycling also becomes attractive for the middle and upper class which really reduces car emission