Are decarbonization strategies municipality-dependent? Generating rural road transport pathways through an iterative process in the Swedish landscape

Review article, 2024

Energy transition studies, focusing on electricity and heating sectors, often consider a local energy system perspective. According to current state-of-the-art, a local energy systems perspective is yet and typically dismissed in the existing road transport decarbonization studies. Such studies tend to be limited to a national or global perspective, ignoring the challenges that rural areas may face. This study aims to develop a context-specific method that considers a local energy perspective when generating rural road transport decarbonization pathways. Literature review findings were iterated through participatory interactions with municipal officials from three Swedish municipalities, representing different-sized rural areas. Based on the municipalities' climate actions (fossil-free municipality targets) and the availability of local resources, five pathways were identified in an iterative and co-development manner. These pathways differed with respect to: (i) local electricity production; (ii) use of bio-sources; (iii) flexibility of public transport services; and (iv) tourism-related road traffic demands. The identified pathways were subjected to a qualitative performance assessment, which revealed that the local feasibility of each identified pathway depends on economic, environmental, and logistical factors. Although all identified pathways have the potential to contribute to the decarbonization of the municipalities' road transport systems, the municipalities preferred different pathways depending on their socio-economic, technical, and regulatory priorities.