Brussels, 13/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - On the eve of the joint Transport/Environment Council (Leuven and Louvain-La-Neuve, 14/15 September, see above), a report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) shows how important it is to think of ways of better integrating the Union's transport and environment politics to create a more sustainable transport system in Europe. The report, "Term 2001: Indicators tracking transport and environment integration in the European Union", notes that alarmingly, despite the efforts by political decision-makers and the transport sector itself to take better account of environmental concerns, the pressures of transport on the environment were continuing to intensify, due to a rapid growth in road and aviation traffic. This trend flies in the face of many of the Union's recently announced objectives, namely cutting the link between economic growth and growth in transport and ensuring that the market share held by rail, maritime and inland shipping is brought in 2010 back to the levels of 1998. The main trends noted are: an inexorable rise in greater use of cars and planes; an increase in the consumption of energy and greenhouse gas emissions due to transport, which is threatening the Union's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol; no increase in the energy efficiency of road freight transport; little change in rail and maritime transport; aviation remains the least efficient means of transport; the inability of Member States to incorporate the cost of environmental damage, accidents and congestion in the prices charged for each form of transport; and a growing segmentation of the EU's landmass by transport infrastructure. This sorry picture is balanced somewhat by a few positive trends, mainly due to technological progress, which has made the new types of vehicle on the market less polluting. In a press release, the EEA's Executive Director, Domingo Jimenez-Beltran, explained that overall, the report demonstrates that in contrast to the published objectives, transport in the Union is becoming less sustainable from an environmental point of view, despite the fact that at the Gothenburg European Summit, transport was identified as one of the four priorities for sustainable development.
(The TERM 2001 report, the second of its kind, was produced by a project jointly piloted by the European Commission (DG Energy and Transport, DG Environment and Eurostat) and the EEA. The full English version is available on the EEA's website: http: //reports.eea.eu.int/term2001/