Railroad and Climate Change Convention

초록

Recently, unusual weather conditions have frequently happened such as enormous flood and snowfall in the world, which are caused by global warming effect. For the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG), advanced countries like EU and Japan have discussed a lot of methods. As the Kyoto protocol entered into force on February 2005, GHG emissions are currently controlled legally. Until now, Korea is not upon the entry into force in Kyoto protocol. Nevertheless, Korea may join the secondary parties of Kyoto protocol because total CO2 emission of Korea is within the top ten in the world. Thus, Korean government has established many policies for the reduction of GHG emission. Railroad is considered as an environment-friendly transportation because its CO2 emission per traffic volume (passenger_km or ton_km) is much lower than that of other transportations. However, a great amount of CO2 is still emitted by the energy consumption of railroad. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce CO2 emission from railroad. In this study, various strategies on Climate Change Convention in railroad were studied. Total CO2 emissions in Korean railroad were investigated and several methods for the reduction of CO2 emission were suggested.