Environmental Performance Assessment of the Transport Sector in the European Union

Sarah B Gruetzmacher,Ângela P Ferreira,Clara B Vaz

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-58808-3_20

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has been promoting diverse initiatives towards sustainable development and environment protection. One of these initiatives is the reduction of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 60% below their 1990 level, by 2050. As the transport sector is responsible for more than 22% of those emissions some strategies need to be taken towards a more sustainable mobility, as the ones proposed in 2011 White Paper on transport. Under this context, this study aims to evaluate the environmental performance of the transport sector in the 28 EU countries towards these goals, from 2015 to 2017. The transport environmental performance is measured through the composite indicator derived from the Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) model. The country transport environmental performance is assessed through the aggregation of multiple sub-indicators using the composite indicator derived from the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. The results indicate that the EU countries slightly improved their transport environmental performance, on average 2.8%. The areas where the inefficient countries need more improvement were also identified: reducing the GHG emissions from fossil fuels, increasing the share of transport energy from renewable sources and improving the public transport share of the total passenger transport.

Highlights

1.1 European transport sectorThe transport sector plays a fundamental role in the European economy by providing services to citizens and businesses and its demand is closely linked to economic growth [1]
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) greenhouse gas (GHG) Human Development Index (HDI) PCA pkm tkm Analytic Hierarchy Process Benefit of the Doubt Conventional BoD model, using the Constant linear transformation technique to transform the data of the anti-isotonic sub-indicators Composite Indicator Dispersion Coefficient Data Envelopment Analysis Decision Making Unit Environmental Performance Index European Union Factor Analysis Variant of the BoD model proposed by R
The composite indicator of transport environmental performance is obtained using the conventional BoD model, using the Constant linear transformation technique to transform the data of the anti-isotonic sub-indicators, and the variant BoD model proposed by Färe, et al in [14] that does not require any transformation on the reverse sub-indicators

Summary

Introduction

The transport sector plays a fundamental role in the European economy by providing services to citizens and businesses and its demand is closely linked to economic growth [1]. Efficient transport services and infrastructure are fundamental for making the most of the economic strengths of all EU regions and supporting the internal market and its growth [2]. In 2015, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transport sector reached 22% of the total European GHG emissions [5]. 1.2 European strategies for the transport sector. The prospect of a more efficient transport service can affect citizens and businesses tangibly, as transport and logistics amount to a sizeable share of companies and households costs. For business that deal with high value products or services, the cost of transport may not be so significant. A reliable transport system is fundamental to ensure the functioning of increasingly complex value chains [2]

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Results

Conclusion