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Climate gap report: transport

Congested motorway traffic

Rob Harrison and Ruth Strange discuss the findings around transport from Closing the Climate Gap 2024: An annual report on progress towards sustainable consumer lifestyles in the UK.

Actions taken this decade will be crucial in mitigating the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Yet, according to our Climate Gap research, we are not cutting emissions fast enough across any of our key lifestyle areas - including our transport.

Transport and climate change

Transport accounts for about a quarter of our emissions, and surface transport emissions are higher than emissions from buildings, industry, agriculture, or aviation. The pandemic showed us it is possible to make rapid and deep cuts, but unfortunately, those reductions are now being reversed.

Impact of electric vehicles starting to be seen

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) 2024 progress report stated, “Surface transport emissions fell slightly, despite overall vehicle-kilometres increasing. This represents the first time that the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) has had a meaningful impact on the direction of emissions trends.”

The CCC stated that the rate of electric vehicle uptake needs to accelerate rapidly to help reduce emissions. Ethical Consumer believes that reducing car demand is crucial alongside switching to electric cars, because they have problems of their own due to the materials and energy needed.

Graph with annual emissions from aviation - figures are in the report
Aviation emissions rising to near pre-pandemic levels

Aviation emissions rising 

The graph for aviation emissions shows that the reduction during the pandemic was temporary, with rates rising to almost pre-pandemic levels.

Ethical Consumer believes the target for reducing aviation emissions in particular could be much more ambitious, especially as in the UK, only 15% of people take 70% of all flights.

We call on consumers to not only reduce their own emissions in these areas, but to also consider getting engaged with political campaigns trying to persuade the government and companies to take some of the actions identified too.

Actions for government, companies and consumers

The report card below summarises the key actions consumers, governments and businesses need to take in order to help meet the CCC's 2030 targets.

Transport report card 2024
  Annual emissions from cars Annual emissions from aviation Electric car registrations
Actions for government Introduce climate statutory duty for councils; sense check road building; support walking, cycling and public transport. Halt airport expansion; frequent-flyer levy; encourage efficiency gains; aviation tax reform. EV purchase subsidies; support rapid rollout of charging infrastructure; mandatory zero-emission sales targets.
Actions for companies Sell more electric vehicles; continue innovating on decarbonising HGVs; reduce distance travelled. Replace business travel; increase plane efficiency; plan towards a just transition for aviation industry. Switch to electric cars and vans; invest in charging infrastructure; support the Climate & Nature bill.
Actions for consumers Reduce distance travelled and switch to lower carbon travel where possible; support Sustrans; support the Transport Action Network; Reduce flying if possible; join Friends of the Earth; support Transport & Environment (T&E). If you need a car replace it with a fully electric vehicle as soon as possible; support Stop Funding Heat's disinformation work.

Access the 2024 report

A summary and PDF of the 2024 report and the other impact areas is available on our campaign page.

The reports include the evidence behind all the information.

At a glance graphs

The 2024 report includes 12 graphs, like the aviation emissions graph above, across the four impact areas of food, heating, transport and consumer goods. These graphs are quick ways to see where progress is taking place, and where the target is going to be very difficult to achieve.

Your feedback

After you have read this report, we’d really appreciate your feedback to help us understand the impact it is having, and improve this in future years.

Handy advice on climate actions you can take

We are creating a series of articles highlighting actions you can take for the climate on the areas of food, heating, transport and consumer goods - see the links below for transport related advice:

Join in

Combined efforts can have greater impact than people on their own. Key transport campaigns to support include:

  • Transport & Environment: Europe-wide coalition of environmental groups campaigning for a zero-emission mobility system
  • Friends of the Earth: campaigns against airport expansions, and for a frequent flyer levy and aviation tax reform
  • Sustrans: national charity promoting walking and cycling
  • Transport Action Network: supports local groups on transport issues e.g. to fight cuts to bus services and to oppose damaging road schemes
  • Stop Funding Heat:  challenges ‘the way newspapers, news sites and online platforms spread climate lies in the pursuit of sales, clicks or vested interests’
  • Climate & Nature Bill: this bill aims to require the UK government to systematically address all consumption (and other) impacts according to the best available science.

We would like to express gratitude to Ecology Building Society for its sponsorship of the 2024 Climate Gap Report.

Ecology Building Society logo

What is the Climate Gap report?

Ethical Consumer's first Climate Gap report was published in October 2021, to track progress towards sustainable consumer lifestyles in the UK. The report helps identify how consumers, governments and companies can work together to help fix the climate crisis.

The report's aim is to track the gap between our current combined consumption emissions and where they need to be by 2030. A second key aim of the project is to produce a simplified list of key actions for consumers, companies and governments.

The report has four sections on the areas where our lifestyle climate impacts are the biggest: food, housing, transport and consumer goods, covering 75% of combined total consumer emissions. It compares where consumer behaviour is in these areas against 2030 targets from reports issued by the UK Government's own Climate Change Committee (CCC). Read more about whether the CCC's targets themselves are robust enough, in the Key Findings on our campaign page.

We update the report annually, to provide science-based targets for consumers, companies and government each year.

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