This publication presents and explains the OECD Guidelines towards Environmentally Sustainable Transport, which have been developed to help governments enable economic development and individual welfare without causing undue health and environmental impacts and depletion of finite resources.
Achieving environmentally sustainable transport (EST) will require widespread acceptance of the need for EST, and a mix of measures designed to overcome the barriers to EST. This proceedings examines the measures needed.
Conventional approaches to mitigating transport's environmental impacts have used observed and projected transport trends and sought to assess the environmental impacts of these trends. Whilst this approach is acknowledged as useful, it is not perceived as capable of leading to meeting long-term environmental objectives. Accordingly the project on Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) was initiated in late 1994. The EST is a backcasting exercise. One or more desirable futures are defined and policy development is guided by an assessment of what is required to achieve them. The project comprised four phases: Phase 1 involved a review of relevant activities of member countries and defining the development of the project; Phase 2 focused on the gap between current and projected trends; Phase 3 has been the backcasting exercise; Phase 4, which has overlapped with Phase 3, refined the criteria for achieving ESTG and development policy guidelines. This report represents the results of Phase 3 of the project.
This book illustrates that decoupling the environmental impacts of transport from economic growth is achievable, through the efficient use of charges, fees, taxes and other economic instruments.
- Substantial progress has been made in improving the sustainability of transport in Europe in a number of areas and is reported in this paper. Nevertheless there remain important problems and challenges: - unsustainable rates of traffic growth ...
This book examines the environmental impacts of international maritime transport, and looks more in detail at the impacts stemming from near-port shipping activities, the handling of the goods in the ports and from the distribution of the goods to the surrounding regions.