Any realistic strategy to reduce global GHG emissions must address transportation in the developing world. Most of the growth in transportation GHGs by 2050 will be in the developing world, and by 2030, more than half of all vehicles will be in non-OECD countries. Failure to address this sector will shift mitigation responsibilities and costs to other sectors, such as electricity generation, or jeopardize achieving targets for atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

There may be no other sector where sustainable development and GHG mitigation are as closely aligned as in the transportation sector – most emissions reduction measures produce significant co-benefits, such as improved air quality and economic development. This sector also provides
unique opportunities for transformational policies that can catalyze low-carbon growth. Implementing measures such as BRT, land-use policies, and congestion pricing in an integrated manner can have many times the impact of putting these same measures in place independently.

Some transportation-sector characteristics inhibit its ability to obtain climate funding: difficulty in determining the business-as-usual baseline; uncertainties in estimating the emissions reductions from mitigation measures (since these often contain a component of human behavior); and high up-front costs but long-term CO2 benefits that tend to grow with time (making shortterm cost-effectiveness evaluations misleading). Thus, policymakers in developing countries often find it extremely frustrating to develop plans to address GHG emissions from the transportation sector.

Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) provide a new framework that can potentially overcome these difficulties and achieve substantial reductions in transportation emissions in developing countries. Broadly defined, NAMAs are actions voluntarily proposed by developing countries that significantly reduce emissions below business-as-usual levels.  NAMAs can be categorized into three groups, which are described in this publication.