Sustainability - National Road Administrations

The Sustainability – National Road Administrators (SUNRA) project addresses all of the objectives of Part A Sustainability within the Energy call. Defining sustainability from an NRA perspective, review and advice to NRAs on sustainability and a sustainability rating system that allows policy to be influenced.

The project will draw on and build on the work of previous and current ERAnet Projects, in particular the work of Strategic Benchmarking and Key Performance Indicators (SBAKPI) and Environmental Indicators for the Total Road Infrastructure Assets (EVITA), which are developing KPIs at strategic and technical levels as well as benchmarking, and projects like Stakeholders' Expectations and Perceptions of the future Road Transport System (EXPECT) which will provide details on expectations.

The project team will have access to NRA organisations in Europe, as well as North America, Asia and Australasia and will use the experience from outside of Europe to help inform and develop the outputs for the project.

The key objectives of the project are to:

• Provide a common definition of sustainable development within the context of European road authorities.
• Provide a common system of measurement of sustainability performance at NRA level through the development of a metric or metrics.
• Provide a framework for a road-project level rating system that enables interventions at the appropriate project stage and for different project types.
• Provide suggested intervention routes through procurement and Life Cycle Cost (LCC).
• Test the definition, metric(s) and rating system with a number of NRAs.
• Disseminate the results.

The NRAs will benefit from the project in the following ways:

• Provide European NRAs with a common understanding and definition of sustainable development.
• Provide NRAs with a scoring system for their sustainability performance allowing them to measure their development over time, benchmark themselves towards other NRAs and encourage them to continuous improvement.
• Enable NRAs to report their performance within sustainable development to stakeholders and budget holders.
• Enable NRAs to make cost effective choices and interventions with respect to sustainable development and improve the long term choices of the organisation.