Low Emission Zones: the local challenge of sustainable mobility

Low Emission Zones

The Low Emission Zones (ZBE) knock on the door of more than 150 municipalities required to implement them, after finally having minimum state regulation. Last Tuesday, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), through approval by the Council of Ministers, implemented Royal Decree 1052/2022, of December 27, which regulates the minimum criteria for these delimited areas where restrictions on access, circulation and parking of vehicles apply to improve air quality and mitigate GHG emissions.

The new Royal Decree follows in the wake of the guidelines set by the ministry in 2021 and the provisions of the Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition. A call to the municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, to island territories And to the towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants that exceed the pollution limit values, so that before January 1, 2023, they implement their Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans and must introduce with them mitigation measures and the establishment of low-emission zones to reduce mobility emissions.

The articles of the new Royal Decree define the specific objectives of the implementation of ZBEs (improve air quality and Mitigate climate change, following in the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement, where global decarbonization objectives were set) as well as the measures associated with these (compliance with acoustic quality objectives;Modal shift drive; and promotion of energy efficiency in transport). Having marked these purposes, local entities are prescribed to establish in their ZBE project concrete and measurable objectives for each of these strategic axes and the implementation of monitoring and tracking systems, so that they can measure the effectiveness and compliance of measures and objectives every four years.

Also noteworthy in this new Royal Decree are some minimum requirements that ZBEs must meet (related to extension, delimitation or access conditions), as well as a referral to the sanctioning regime and the establishment of specific signs for ZBE regulated in the DGT instruction MOV 21/3.

Sustainable mobility, absent constituencies and intergenerational territories

By virtue of the principle of local autonomy, and being consistent with a conception of municipal entities as true discoverers of needs and opportunities, aware of their own characteristics and contexts -beyond the substantive requirements posed by the Royal Decree in order to provide homogeneity and legal certainty- the regulatory text does not specify a concrete formula for carrying out and implementing ZBEs.

However, the main obstacle faced by ambitious transformations in the area - in this case - of sustainable mobility are the so-called Absent constituencies. As is reasonable, when electoral cycles approach, government teams tend not to pay attention to anything other than to the demands of the here and now. The tragic characteristic of public problems associated with environmental health and well-being The fact is that, due to their usual diffuse and indirect nature, they appear in a constituency that has no vote: the constituency of the future (increasingly less future and more present due to the outrage of the consequences of the climate crisis). Urgency overlaps with importance, and it is common that, at electoral time, both decision makers and voters (in a kind of shared responsibility), tend to forget the data published by the World Health Organization and the European Environment Agency that warn about how air pollution affects the burden of disease derived from strokes, lung cancer and chronic and acute pneumopathies (making population groups such as children, the elderly and families with low incomes, more polluted neighborhoods and worse health care).

These alarm data, together with the push of European aid and the consensus of all international organizations, mean the perfect opportunity for the development of sustainable urban mobility strategies at the height of the circumstances. The obligation of local authorities to evaluate and review pollution indices, together with the growing and transversal demand of citizens to live in cities that are friendly to their health, invites public decision makers to set more ambitious city objectives and strategies in terms of sustainable mobility.

One of the great opportunities presented by the implementation of an ambitious sustainable mobility strategy is the design of Intergenerational Cities, which addresses the aporia presented by the Austrian thinker Iván Illich in Energy and Equity (1973), when he demonstrated that there is a speed threshold and a use of non-metabolic energy that, once exceeded, damages the very capacity of human beings to move, revealing that motorization hinders the demotorized, and that fast people exclude slow people from common space. If we repair our public spaces, orienting them towards the health, safety and well-being of families, we will offer more comfortable and habitable urban habitats for the two population groups with the greatest needs and risks: children and the elderly. This is the case that the new regulations make possible, considering the possibility of establishing several ZBEs in a city, being able - as several municipalities are already carrying out - to establish ZBEs and “pacified” places (in terms of circulatory speed) around educational centers, spaces for play, recreation and family walks, and meeting places for the elderly.

Urban planning in this sense must be comprehensive, and at the same time it aspires to be part of the Network of Walking Cities (promoting local life, generalizing universal accessibility, opting for holiday, recreational, cultural and sporting public spaces, and assuming the circulation of only really necessary cars) we must think about the socio-economic development of the city, articulating a strong urban public transport system and the design of balancing strategies that make it possible to adapt the movements really necessary for the economic-productive development of population centers.

In this regard, Environmental Ideas is the key collaborator of public administrations in their roadmaps to sustainable towns, cities and territories. In addition to extensive and flexible services tailored to each situation - addressing everything related to the different Strategies for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change, Local Carbon Footprints, and Urban Agendas and SDGs 2030-, we have a multidisciplinary team responsible for advising and accompanying municipalities and their government teams in relation to the required Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans and the establishment of ZBEs.

Ideas MedioAmbiental is oriented towards sustainable territories through a service, in this case related to local mobility and ZBE implementation plans, characterized by:

• Technical-participatory diagnostics of mobility (for rural or urban contexts and centers).
• Co-design and participatory implementation (anticipation and enhancement of possible dissent and improvement of decision-making).
• Just Green Transition Approach (that leaves no one behind and takes into account the situation of mobility in the low-income population).
• Indicator systems to facilitate mandatory evaluation and monitoring (facilitating the achievement of mandatory quadrennial objectives and accountability).
• Comprehensive energy advice in relation to sustainable mobility alternatives (development of viable programs for the installation of charging points, audits or renewal of municipal fleets, etc.).

Valentín Cano, Sustainability