Climate Communications Campaign

National Sustainable Mobility Policy | Year One Progress Report

There is a need to promote greater awareness and understanding across society about the ambition for transport – and what’s required - in the Climate Action Plan 2023 (CAP23).

There are four core areas underpinning the strategy. These include:

1. Prioritising widespread public communications and engagement; this includes a national advertising campaign due to launch later this summer; this will be supported by various community and stakeholder engagement activities, either through the expansion of existing programmes, or development of new ones

As per Action 68 of the SMP, Government committed to developing and implementing a public engagement strategy to promote the benefits of sustainable mobility and raise public awareness of options. Building on this approach, CAP23 includes a new and enhanced action (TR/23/6), which provides for the development and implementation of a ‘Climate Action and Sustainable Mobility Communications Strategy’.

2. Developing more consistent, proactive consultation and communication techniques to enhance project acceptance rates amongst communities for active travel and public transport infrastructure projects; lessons learned from the delivery of past projects will be incorporated, best-practice case studies will be developed and additional support for robust evaluation methods will be provided, amongst others

A multi-layered communication and engagement strategy is being developed and will be implemented over the period 2023 to 2025. The main objective of the strategy is to build awareness and acceptance, and inspire ownership for action, across individuals, private organisations and public sector bodies, whilst also increasing support for delivery of critical infrastructure. Details of this strategy were also included in a Memorandum for the Information of the Government that was brought to cabinet in April 2023.

3. Exploring the potential for the role of car advertising and labelling to support consumers in making more informed and sustainable choices when purchasing new cars or considering the best mode of transport for different journey types; guidelines, new or enhanced self-regulatory frameworks, and a potential longer-term review of regulations are some of the envisaged outputs

4. Developing an evaluation framework and research support, including a long-term attitudes and behaviour impact research study, to measure changing attitudes towards sustainable mobility as the strategy is implemented; in addition, this will be supported by a robust evaluation framework as well as on-going research for best-practice communications and engagement activities in the area of sustainable mobility.