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Press Release
NEWS RELEASE
Copenhagen, 11 September 2001
Pressure on the environment caused by transport, especially rapidly-growing road and air transport, is continuing to increase despite efforts by policymakers and the transport sector itself to take greater account of environmental concerns, a new European Union report shows.
The European Environment Agency is publishing the report, TERM 2001, ahead of a joint meeting of EU ministers of transport and environment this weekend in Belgium.
"Overall, the report shows that transport in the EU is becoming less and not more environmentally sustainable,” EEA Executive Director Domingo Jiménez-Beltrán said. "Progress towards a more sustainable transport system has become imperative and efforts to integrate environmental considerations into transport policy have to be redoubled.”
Transport contributes to damage to the environment and human health by emitting significant levels of toxic pollutants and "greenhouse” gases, generating wastes and noise and fragmenting the countryside.
Most of the report's key indicators signal unfavourable trends or show that there is still a long way to go to reach policy targets for "greening” transport.
The report warns that current trends point away from achieving the EU's recently-announced objectives of breaking the link between economic growth and growth in transport, and of returning the market shares taken by rail, maritime and inland waterway transport to 1998 levels by 2010.
As a shift towards greater use of cars and planes continues, passenger and freight transport is growing at a faster rate than the economy as a whole, bringing increasing threats to the environment and human health, it says.
For example, growth in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from transport is jeopardising the EU's ability to meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol on combating climate change.
But there are also some positive trends, mainly due to advances in technology and fuels that have made new road vehicles less polluting. A significant improvement in urban air quality has resulted, although in many cities air quality still poses health risks and further improvement is needed.
The energy efficiency of car transport has improved slightly over the past two decades, although low occupancy rates and the use of heavier and more powerful vehicles have partly offset fuel efficiency gains in new cars.
There has been no increase, however, in the energy efficiency of freight transport by road and little corresponding change in rail or shipping. Air transport remains the least energy efficient mode of transport despite technological advances.
The report argues that better integration of environmental considerations into all areas of transport policy-making is required to achieve progress towards a more environmentally sustainable transport system.
Most EU countries have developed integrated transport and environment strategies or are doing so, but many of these have yet to be finalised, funded and implemented.
In addition, national strategies are not always in line with EU strategies and policies. Most notable is the failure to implement the goal of integrating the costs of environmental damage, accidents and congestion into the prices charged for each mode of transport.
However, there are signs of progress in that several Member States are now moving towards tax structures that differentiate between the various modes on the basis of their environmental costs, although implementation of these still faces many barriers.
Another finding is that decisions on transport infrastructure are still being made mainly in response to problems of traffic bottlenecks, an approach that favours the expansion of road and airport infrastructure.
"The report shows that to restrain the growth in transport, efforts are also needed in other sectors,” Mr Jiménez-Beltrán said.
He added: "Action is required in the tourism sector since tourism travel is the fastest growing category of passenger transport. And industry has an essential role to play in the development of more transport-efficient production and distribution systems and in the improvement of freight logistics.”
TERM 2001's findings and projections include the following:
The full report in English is posted on the EEA's web site at http://reports.eea.europa.eu/term2001
Notes to editors
- The full name of the report is TERM 2001: Indicators tracking transport and environment integration in the European Union. It is the second report to result from the EU's transport and environment reporting mechanism (TERM). The TERM process is steered jointly by the European Commission (Directorate-General for Energy and Transport, Directorate-General for Environment, Eurostat) and the EEA.
- TERM statistics are published by Eurostat, the EU's Statistical Office, in Transport and environment: statistics for the transport and environment reporting mechanism (TERM) for the European Union, 2001. http://europa.europa.eu/comm/eurostat
- EU ministers with responsibility for transport and the environment will hold an informal joint meeting on 14-16 September 2001 in Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium at the invitation of the Belgian presidency of the EU. The meeting will focus on the need to integrate environment and transport policies further with the aim of creating a more sustainable transport system.
- EU heads of state and government, at their June 2001 summit meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, singled out transport as one of four priority areas for sustainable development policy and called for action to bring about a significant decoupling of transport growth from economic growth, in particular through a shift from road to rail, water and public passenger transport. http://ue.europa.eu/en/Info/eurocouncil/index.htm
- The European Commission, in its July 2001 political guidelines for its forthcoming White Paper on the future of the EU's common transport policy, recommended action to return the market shares of rail, maritime transport and inland waterways to their 1998 levels by 2010. http://europa.europa.eu/comm/energy_transport/en/lb_en.html
- Under the Kyoto Protocol the EU is committed to cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases during the 2008-2012 period to 8% below 1990 levels.
About the EEA
The European Environment Agency aims to support sustainable development and to help achieve significant and measurable improvement in Europe's environment through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information to policy making agents and the public. Established by the European Union (EU) in 1990 by Council Regulation 1210/90 (subsequently amended by Council Regulation 933/1999), the Agency is the hub of the European environment information and observation network (EIONET), a network of some 600 environmental bodies and institutes across Europe.
Located in Copenhagen and operational since 1994, the EEA is open to all countries that share its objectives. The Agency currently has 24 member countries. These are the 15 EU Member States; Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, which are members of the European Economic Area (EEA); and, since 1 August 2001, six of the 13 countries in central and eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area that are seeking accession to the EU -- Bulgaria, Cyprus, Latvia, Malta, Slovenia and the Slovak Republic. Their membership makes the EEA the first EU body to take in the candidate countries.
The remaining seven candidate countries -- the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Turkey -- will become members of the Agency once they, too, ratify their EEA membership agreements. It is anticipated that they will do so over the next few months, taking the Agency's membership to a total of 31 countries.
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For references, please go to https://eea.europa.eu./media/newsreleases/TERM-2001-en or scan the QR code.
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