Evaluating Economic Feasibility and Technical Progress of Environmentally Sustainable Scenarios by a Backcasting Approach with ESCOT

The aim of the System Dynamics Model ESCOT is to describe a path towards a sustainable transport system in Germany and to assess its economic impacts. ESCOT was developed within the environmentally sustainable transport (EST) project of the OECD that was designed to consider the ecological and technical aspects of a transition towards sustainable transportation. ESCOT comprises five models: the macroeconomic, the transport, the regional economic, the environmental and the policy model. The economic assessment for environmentally sustainable scenarios show that the departure from car and road freight oriented transport policy is far from leading to an economic breakdown. With an expansion of the time period for the transition we derived even more encouraging results. For the economic assessment it is important that ESCOT considers not only first round effects but also secondary effects. This ability makes ESCOT to a powerful instrument for the assessment of such large ecological changes.