Evaluating sustainable transportation infrastructure investments

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The transportation sector contributes significantly to the two most pressing atmospheric challenges: air pollution and climate change. Air pollution contributes to 7000 premature deaths annually in Canada, and is one of the top five risk factors contributing to premature death worldwide. Climate change is expected to be the greatest public health challenge of this century, and will significantly affect air pollution and infrastructure. Building, maintaining and using transportation infrastructure releases emissions into the air that exacerbate both air pollution and climate change, leading to damages to human health and the economy. CPCS is a Canadian-based global firm with a core business in developing strategies for transportation service providers. Increasingly, they need to incorporate sustainability into their assessments in a meaningful way. Recent advances in integrated and reduced form modelling have made it possible to evaluate how transportation sector decisions affect sustainability related to air pollution and climate change. However, new research is needed to apply these approaches to new regions in Canada, and incorporate them into a process that can be incorporated into CPCS existing multicriteria decision analysis. This project will develop such a process, in collaboration with CPCS. It will adapt, extend, and evaluate techniques including mobile emissions models, infrastructure emissions models, integrated models of the economy and earth system, and reduced-form impacts models so that novel research can be applied in evaluating sustainable infrastructure investments. This will inform the sustainability of strategic investments by Canadian transportation service providers. Enabling more sustainable decisions will yield environmental, social and economic benefits for the long duration of this critical infrastructure.