Although there is an emerging consensus that current patterns of transport activity are not environmentally sustainable, there is no clear vision of what might constitute "sustainable transport". This project has been developing such a vision to help guide policy debate about the future of transport activity. It has mobilised the efforts in a dozen OECD countries, inspired a similar study for Central and Eastern Europe and has produced a valuable body of work to inform transport and environmental policy-making into the 21st century.
The " Towards Sustainable Transportation" (also available in french) OECD conference was held in Vancouver on March 24-27, 1996. The conference was organised in response to the concerns of governments that transportation poses severe challenges for sustainable development. It brought together over 400 policy-makers, governments and NGO representatives to assess the state of the art knowledge in reducing transport's environmental impacts and to chart a path towards more environmentally sustainable transport systems. It was at this conference the idea of EST emerged.
This joint OECD/UNEP and Austrian project extended the methodology developed by the OECD's project on Environmentally Sustainable Transport to Central and Eastern European Countries. The final report discusses future transport trends in the region, their likely environmental impacts and traces alternative development paths that lead to more environmentally sustainable transport.
The OECD maintains an extensive set of environmental indicators, including those related to transport. These are regularly updated and included in the OECD Environmental Data Compendium publications. A recent report on Indicators for the Integration of Environmental Concerns into Transport Policies has been released on this topic. The ECMT also publishes an extensive transport data set.
In 1995, the ECMT and the OECD published a report investigating strategies for bringing about more sustainable forms of urban travel. This project revisits that earlier work and builds on it by explicitly focusing on the practical issues surrounding the implementation of these strategies. To this end, the project teams have organised a series of thematic workshops, a multiple-city survey of policies and implementation issues concerning urban travel and a number of in-depth country reviews. The results of this work are housed on the ECMT Urban Travel and Sustainable Development web-site ( http://www.oecd.org/cem/urbtrav/).
In the context of the OECD's work on resource efficiency and sustainable consumption patterns, the OECD undertook in 1997 a project examining the applicability of the business concept of eco-efficiency to the transport sector. Download the document [ ENV/EPOC/PPC/T(98)5].
Relatively little work has been undertaken at the international level to understand some of the principal motivations behind the travel behaviour of individuals. The ITB project has brought together a broad range of social scientists to discuss some of these motivating factors and their policy implications. Download the document [ OCDE/GD(97)144].
The Background and Synthesis report, prepared by the OECD Environment Directorate, presents an overview of key conclusions and findings that can be derived from recent work by OECD, the IEA and the ECMT on transport and the environment and OECD's sustainable development initiative. It is intended to summarise the current state of our knowledge and help to assess the degree to which understanding of the potential effects of a wide range of possible policy responses could now offer the prospect of a comprehensive, integrated strategy for sustainable transport in OECD countries. The Survey of OECD, IEA and ECMT work presents an overview of recent, ongoing and planned work carried out by the OECD, the IEA, and the ECMT on "Transport and Environment". This Survey was done to provide information to the corresponding bodies, highlight joint projects and interrelations between these activities and facilitate future co-operative efforts.
This stocktaking of recent work was undertaken by the OECD Environment Directorate as a contribution to the collective efforts of all three organisations.
