1. Where’s the Carbon? Where’s the Carbon? Optimising the Lake District’s Transport Framework to reduce carbon emissions The UK is committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 34% on 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80% by 2050. But where should we target effort to achieve this? This document summarises the relative scales of CO 2 emissions from different sectors and subsectors of the Lake District’s transport system – by journey purposes, origins and modes. This can then inform the prioritisation of interventions – policy and initiatives. The two main areas of influence are: The Transport Framework for a Sustainable Lake District. The 5 work streams will be finessed to optimise carbon reduction. This will involve (i) designing initiatives to tackle the known CO 2 sources, (ii) changing the emphasis of specific initiatives to optimise their carbon reducing potential and (iii) informing prioritisation between initiatives. Cumbria’s 3 rd Local Transport Plan (from 2011). Policy creation will be informed by this work to that a policy framework is created that delivers carbon reduction. 1.What proportion of the Lake District’s carbon footprint is from transport & travel? There are 3 answers to this apparently simple question: 1. The English National Park Authorities Association recently estimated the carbon footprints for the nine National Parks in England 1. This shows that: Per capita carbon footprint for the Lake District is 14.7 tCO 2 e. This is significantly greater than national and NW regional averages of 7.3t and 7t (2006 2 ). If the effective visitor population is added to the resident population, 14.7 t reduces to 7.4 tCO 2 e. All transport within the Lake District contributes 290.2 kt CO 2 /year, 42.3% of the park’s total carbon footprint This is significantly greater than for the other English national parks Summary & headline findings This work has been carried out by the LDNPA, January – July 2010. For more information, contact alistair.kirkbride@lakedistrict.gov.uk; alistair.kirkbride@lakedistrict.gov.uk 01539 792710 Note on data sources and quality Deriving robust carbon footprint results for an area is notoriously difficult. The issues encountered here include: data available from the same year: that used here is from 2006, 2008 or 2009 data from the Lake District itself: Most data relates to Cumbria and is scaled by Lake District populations and visitor numbers appropriate boundaries: most results here relate to travel around the Lake District. However, we also show that travel to and from the Lake District by visitors is highly significant. appropriate populations: per capita carbon emissions usually relate to the resident population, whereas in the Lake District, the effective population is doubled with visitors. The data used here were from mainstream sources, principally the 2008 National Travel Survey (DfT / ONS), the 2009 Cumbria visitors survey (Cumbria Tourism), Transport Statistics for Great Britain with other data as appropriate. Details of the data sources with comments on data quality are given in the accompanying “WtC data source summary.DOC”  53.6% of the transport CO 2 emissions relating to the Lake District are from visitors getting to or from the park. 29.8% are from visitors flying – even though this only accounts for 7% of visitors  Car use by residents and visitors accounts for 60.4% of carbon emissions of travel around the park.  Goods travel around and across the park accounts for 22.2% of emissions around the park.  Some of these are easier to influence than others, and different partners will have different roles. All travel Travel around the LD 2. The remainder of this work has calculated the transport carbon emissions “bottom up”. This involves using the best locally relevant datasets wherever they are available. Excluding all transport outside the park – e.g. by residents or visitors accessing the park. This total comes to 161.3 kt CO2/year. This approach is more useable for estimating the relative impacts of policies or initiatives 3. The “bottom up” calculation that includes all transport relating to the park – including visitor travel to & from the park (including aviation) – totals 431.3 kt CO2/year 25.7% 4.2% 21.2% 41.9% 0.2% 6.6%

2. 2. Travel within the Lake District All personal travel by residents (by all modes) in the Lake District produces 57,702 t CO 2 /year, 35.7% of that from all transport within the park. 28% of resident travel emissions are from leisure journeys – such as visiting friends & family or going to the cinema. With shopping (20%) and commuting (16%), they make up 64% of residents’ transport emissions. a Residents Visitor travel within the Lake District contributes c. 51,611 t CO 2 /year, 32.0% of that from all transport in the park. b Visitors 93% of emissions from visitor travel around the park is, unsurprisingly, from the use of cars, vans or motor bikes. HGV emissions contribute 15.7% of transport emissions, and small vans a further 16.5%. c Goods & freight 3. Visitor travel to the Lake District a Mode of travel The emissions from visitor travel to the Lake District is greater than all travel within Lake District. While these lie outside NI186 and LTP3, Lake District related policy, initiatives and organisations could potentially influence their reduction. Emissions from travel to the Lake District is dominated by aviation from overseas followed by car / van use from the UK. While tackling aviation emissions may be difficult form a Lake District perspective (overseas visitors are probably coming to the UK or Europe anyway), there are many ways to shift UK car trips to the Lake District. b Visitor origin 4. Towards action The Lake District is popular to visitors from a variety of areas. These charts suggest that we need to consider focussing more on changing how people travel from further away whilst encouraging growth in the local visitor market. These results have been derived to inform action. The two main outputs are the Transport Framework for a Sustainable Lake District and Cumbria’s Local Transport Plan. The interpretation of these results is made in the accompanying document “WtC interventions.DOC”