A directional Lipschitz extension lemma, with applications to uniqueness and Lagrangianity for the continuity equation

We prove a Lipschitz extension lemma in which the extension procedure simultaneously preserves the Lipschitz continuity for two nonequivalent distances. The two distances under consideration are the Euclidean distance and, roughly speaking, the geodesic distance along integral curves of a (possibly multi-valued) flow of a continuous vector field. The Lipschitz constant for the geodesic distance of the extension can be estimated in terms of the Lipschitz constant for the geodesic distance of the original function. This Lipschitz extension lemma allows us to remove the high integrability assumption on the solution needed for the uniqueness within the DiPerna-Lions theory of continuity equations in the case of vector fields in the Sobolev space W-1,W-p, where p is larger than the space dimension, under the assumption that the so-called "forward-backward integral curves" associated to the vector field are trivial for almost every starting point. More precisely, for such vector fields we prove uniqueness and Lagrangianity for weak solutions of the continuity equation that are just locally integrable. Additionally, for such vector fields it is possible to prove almost everywhere uniqueness of (standard) integral curves, which also implies uniqueness of positive measure solutions to the continuity equation with absolutely continuous initial datum.