Review on Georgia Sustainable Transport Roadmap
The sustainable transport roadmap for Georgia is an important step towards tackling the environmental costs of transportation, especially through its focus on technological innovation and the shift towards electric vehicles, which shows the roadmap’s recognition of the urgent need to cut emissions.
However, the paper relies heavily on technology-driven solutions and gives less wight to people-centred policies that could improve mobility in fairer and more sustainable ways. This risks prioritising technological substitution over more fundamental system-level changes, such as investing in public transport, active mobility, and integrated regional and urban planning, which are crucial for long-term sustainability and accessibility.
The roadmap could also be enriched by drawing on the guidance of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which recommends applying a ‘well-being lens’ to climate policy. This perspective calls for two essential mind-set shifts to help meet net-zero targets: first, focus on ends such as social well-being instead of means like gross domestic product; and second, examine how systems function, like car dependency, instead of individual components in isolation, such as vehicles.1
This peer review is prepared with this perspective in mind and in the hope of encouraging the authors to engage more fully with this dimension.
