Cape Town -- The Mother City is among the top 10 global cities causing the most pollution through traffic, new research has found.
The research, conducted by Utility Bidder, explored the world’s most polluted cities, basing their research on a variety of environmental factors, including air quality, light pollution, carbon footprint and traffic inefficiencies.
At least 54 cities were evaluated.
Cape Town clinched the ninth spot, while Los Angeles was ranked first, followed by Delhi, while Vienna scored the lowest.
City’s Mayco member for mobility, Rob Quintas said they are tackling the issue head-on.
“The City’s Congestion Relief programme, which is implementable over the next few years will go a long way to easing congestion on our roads.
“Congestion, or red time, is a large contributor to carbon emissions due to vehicles standing with engines running,” he said.
Quintas added that they will be able to lower emissions “considerably” with the roll-out of the programme and keeping vehicles moving.
“Furthermore, our new fleet of MyCiti buses will run on Euro 5 Diesel, or ‘green diesel’, which also has significantly lower emissions than previous fleet buses,” he said.
Weekend Argus previously reported that the Cape metro was considering taking steps to cut diesel from its public transit system, the MyCiti bus service.
Just like its competitor, the privately-owned Golden Arrow Bus Service, it wants to look into the viability of introducing electric buses to its fleet, but only in the “long run”.
Transport in Cape Town, a city whose per capita energy-related carbon footprint in 2019 increased by 4.9%, is the biggest contributor by sector of carbon emissions in the city.
The recent COP27 climate conference saw countries agreeing to measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to the impacts of climate change while also boosting financial support, technology and capacity-building needed by developing countries to see this through.
Weekend Argus.