REFIT - Refinement and Test of Sustainable Indicators and Tools with Regard to European Transport
Overview
Background & policy context:
European transport policies are increasingly important but the tools available to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies are still inadequate and fragmented. It was necessary to provide the European Commission with a comprehensive methodology for assessing the impact of various transport policies and strategies on sustainability. The key challenge was to develop a methodology that takes into account the economic, the environmental and the social dimension of sustainability.
The REFIT consortium felt that the weaknesses of sustainability assessments of transport policy at the time of the project were:
- the bad linkages between transport models and sustainability indicators;
- the incompleteness of existing modelling tool box;
- the tendency to address measures in isolation while assessment of policy packages is needed in order to include cumulative and cross-over effects.
The REFIT project targeted these weaknesses.
Objectives:
The objective of the project was to provide a set of sustainability indicators for assessing the effect of various transport policies packages of priority interest through state-of-art models at European scale.
The REFIT project built upon the combination of the SCENES, TREMOVE and CGEurope models (a combination that covers many of the aspects needed to evaluate transport policy). Starting with these tools, three main actions were proposed:
- a comprehensive assessment framework will be developed that links European transport objectives and indicators on the one hand, and the growing pool of tools and expertises built up within various European projects on the other hand;
- new additional evaluation modules will be developed to produce data for those policy targets and indicators that were till now hard to address quantitatively, notably impacts on regional development, employment, fair competition between modes, noise and air pollution exposure, personal health, safety, equity and income distribution;
- a rigorous assessment of policy packages on all three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, environmental, and social)will be made, testing and validating the methodology.
Methodology:
The project adopted the following assumptions and methodological guidelines:
- the study should be based on the state-of-the-art concerning modelling tools. This means that the project should not consist of building a new model or new major pieces of existing models, but in making the best use of existing models. For this reason the TRANSTOOLS/TREMOVE/CGEurope integrated model structure is chosen as main quantitative tool of the system. In addition new ad-hoc evaluation modules will be developed to produce appropriate indicators in relation to the different impact categories/policy targets: safety, emissions, noise, land use, employment, etc.
- the sustainability indicators should address the three different dimensions: economic, environmental and social. Policy should be comparable both from the point of view of each dimension and taking into account all dimensions at the same time, using a transparent method for aggregating different indicators.
- the analysis should take into account the degree of uncertainty attached to several aspects of any study focused on a social environment (from input data to modelling assumptions, etc.). Furthermore it should provide elements to assess robustness of the outcomes with respect to key variables. This will be done by appropriate sensitivity tests and results validation.
The methodological approach is characterised by three groups of activities:
- Policy package definition. Input from the policy makers with the different objectives and linkage to indicators
- Modelling. Use of the three core-models and the developed ad-hoc models to assess the effects of the transport policy on the different objectives.
- Assessment. Different assessment possibilities are delivered to evaluate the policies in an appropriate way, fitting with the objectives of the policy.
The work is divided into the following steps:
- identification of sustainability indicators;
- development of assessment framework;
- refinement of economic dimension;
- refinement of social dimension;
- refinement of environmental dimension;
- assessment of policy packages;
- conclusion.
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