Assessing the equity of carbon mitigation policies for transport in Scotland

•Little attention is paid to the social equity impacts of carbon mitigation policies in transport.•Systematic measures of differential social impacts of carbon mitigation in transport are needed.•Policy makers need an easy way to understand equity impacts of policy decisions.

Different social groups exhibit diverse travel behaviours and will thus experience very different outcomes in adapting to any changes to the transport system. This paper is concerned with making more transparent the equity implications of transport policies that are designed to change people's travel behaviours; explicitly those designed to mitigate the carbon impacts of the domestic transport sector. This is a relatively new area of transport policy delivery within the United Kingdom and elsewhere and, as yet, social equity considerations appear to be largely absent from the policy debate. This is in part due to a lack of suitable policy appraisal tools to identify their social consequences of such policies at the national and local level.To this end, we have developed an evaluation framework to test the social equity effects of the carbon mitigation policies for transport. The paper offers an example analysis of three policy measures that selected from Scotland's strategy for mitigating climate change in the transport sector. The case study has been chosen because the necessary strategy and policies are already well developed and so sufficient information is available to evaluate its likely behaviour changes outcomes. The paper concludes that there is a significant gap in both scientific and policy knowledge in this area and that a universal lack of data (i.e. not only in Scotland but internationally) is a major barrier to the robust analysis of the equity impacts of climate change mitigation measures. It also identifies some potential avenues for future research.