To consider climate change mitigation in Latin America and the Caribbean, it is important to understand what the solutions are for the oncoming problems of a changing environment. The relevance of the issue lies in the increase of global temperatures caused by anthropogenic activities, mainly due to the burning of fuels where the transport sector is one of the largest emitters of Greenhouse Gasses (GHG) in the world; and the need for cities and local governments to carry out actions to mitigate these kinds of emissions.

Although Europe is in a different situation compared to Latin America in the context of climate change, we can think of the actions that Germany carried out (and is still carrying out) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector.

In Germany, emissions from the transport sector represent 19.83% of total emissions by the year 2022). In Latin America and the Caribbean, this sector is the main source of GHG emissions (approximately 39% of total emissions) and, for example, in Argentina it represents 14% of total emissions (for the year 2020). It is estimated that about 55% of the people in the world live in cities (with the Latin American and Caribbean region being the second most urbanized region) and could reach 68% by 2050 (in the case of Argentina, the rate of urbanization is 92%). Roughly, cities consume about 78% of the world`s energy and, at the same time, produce more than 60% of GHG emissions.

In this lecture, on one hand we can consider the actions that Germany is carrying out in Latin America to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through sustainable urban mobility; and on the other hand, we would talk about what are the characteristics of the region -Latin America- that have to be taken into account to adapt the successful examples that have already been applied in Germany (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, for example).