The transport industry is one of the few sectors in which emissions continue to grow, contributing 26% to the global CO₂ emissions. Transport agencies everywhere in the world are focusing on mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Policy-makers are under pressure to tackle the issue of climate change and approach sustainable transport by promoting more sustainable practices and altering behavior. This paper attempts to explore the impact of transport on climate change through the lens of governance by establishing a systematic review framework. The results showed that developing nations should be influential in managing their public transport agencies to achieve economic transformation. They require a functional, reliable, and effective transport system and these can only be derived by properly formulated and implemented policies with the aid of all relevant private, academic, and government bodies working together. This study concluded that developing nations need to manage their pricing methods, using them to facilitate transport systems that are unlikely to affect the climate. To this end, transport policy and governance need to be reviewed to take into account climate change and natural disaster concerns. Additionally, guidelines and strategies should be proposed for every actor involved, i.e., transport community, top-level leaders, and all governmental levels and private sectors.

The agglomeration of airports into multi-airport regions (MARs) has become one of the salient features of the worldwide air transport system in the last decades. Meanwhile, in China, the development of HSR is growing quickly, and is both competitive to and cooperative with the aviation network. To date some research has focused on the airport classification with aviation network properties within the specific MARs. However, little research comprehensively integrates complementary transport systems (such as civil aviation versus high-speed rail (HSR)) into the analytical framework for airport classification. The purpose of this paper is to identify the unique nature of component airports and their distribution in MARs in China from multiple perspectives by accounting for the influence of the HSR system. Airports are classified along multiple dimensions including competitive concentrations, the interaction between air transport and HSR, and airport community structure, among others. The results produce distinct partitions of the component airports in Chinese MARs, and provide insights into Chinese airport functionality and impacts of the HSR network on the distribution of different types of airports. The conclusions provide a more comprehensive assessment of airports’ spatial arrangement in the unique Chinese MAR context. Although this paper did not derive the market share allocation and co-opetition relationship between a specific airport and HSR, it proposed a basic framework for future research.

With the rapid expansion of China’s domestic air transport network (CATN), it is fundamental to model which factors and mechanisms impact this development. This paper investigates how the combined endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the evolution of CATN based on longitudinal data by utilizing a more all-encompassing methodology of stochastic actor based-modeling (SABM). Endogenous variables include a density effect, a betweenness effect, a transitivity closure effect, and a ‘number of distances-two’ effect. Exogenous variables incorporate airport hierarchy, a distance effect, presence or absence of low-cost carriers (LCCs) and high-speed rail (HSR). The systematic classification of Chinese airports into more than the typical two or three tiers allows the impacts of the four endogenous covariates to be revealed. Overall, the CATN has tended to evolve into a more compacted and non-concentrated network structure through the creation of non-stop routes and closed triads. The integrated inclusion of low-cost carrier and high-speed rail effects highlights the importance of market presence to the initiation of new routes at initial stages, cultivating potential demand and increasing accessibility. In addition, the construction of HSR to one primary airport within a multi-airport system can raise “shadow effects” for other airports. Our findings provide policy suggestions for airport operators in terms of developing accurate positions in the hierarchy and strengthening transfer ability.

This paper investigates the causal impact of the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., 2020) on airlines’ crisis response strategies from the supply perspective in the EU-US market. An analytical framework examining three strategies, namely market exit, capacity retrenchment, and route hierarchy persevering, is established by utilizing the difference-in-differences (DID) method, which jointly considers dynamics in pandemic severity, border control policies, and route structure. The results demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic led to the disappearance of diversity in the business models of the EU-US market in the short term. Analysis of individual airlines’ capacity retrenchment strategies reveals heterogeneity in the impact of COVID-19. The route hierarchy persevering analysis exhibits three distinct strategies of airlines, i.e., connectivity-oriented, antitrust immunity joint venture-oriented, and market presence-oriented.