Transport transitions in LMICs: context-appropriate modelling frameworks for accelerating pathways towards clean, equitable access to goods and servic

Transport-energy transitions pose complex challenges that have been extensively studied in high-income countries (HICs) in response to national mandates for climate action. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), however, have low but rapidly growing motorisation rates and face very different challenges in adopting new technologies to foster economic development and ensure equitable, clean access to transportation.

This research aims to push forwards the state of the art in transport-energy-environment system modelling to inform the development of robust pathways - in terms of policy, projects and finance - towards clean and equitable transport systems.

The focus of the PhD would be to develop novel modelling frameworks applicable to transport systems in LMICs, building in to it such features as:

- A transport demand tool based on scenario analysis, allowing extrapolation of business as usual (BaU) trends and alternative demand pathways resulting from land-use policy interventions such as transit-oriented development (TOD) and 15-minute cities, and government involvement in public/para-transit systems;

- A vehicle stock model based on the particularities of LMIC vehicle markets, including a significant reliance on second-hand imported vehicles;

- The infrastructure and service requirements arising from future evolutions of popular/informal transport systems, including minibus taxis (tro-tros, matatus) and two-wheeler taxis (okadas, boda-bodas)

The PhD is aligned with the FCDO-funded Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme (for which supervisor James Dixon is the transport co-lead), and the outputs of this PhD will be leveraged to improve the outputs of CCG. As such, it is expected that this PhD would lead to a number of high-quality academic publications co-authored between the student and researchers across the CCG consortium including Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Loughborough, Imperial and KTH, and a growing number of international collaborators across CCG's 8 partner countries: Kenya, Laos, Zambia, Vietnam, Ghana, India, Malawi and Nepal.