CIENS-SIS: Sustainable Transport - Drivers, Change, Impacts, Policies

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The environmental research institutes behind this proposal offer a unique interdisciplinary research competence in addressing the linkages between societal drivers, environmental change, impacts and policies in a common analytical framework, i.e. the enha nced causal chain for the relations between transport and environment. Sustainable transport is chosen as a common, and increasingly crucial, environmental research area. Transport produces the more persistent, and resistant, of the environmental problems . It also brings about a broad range of problems: both global and local emissions; health and ecological impacts; land take and landscape changes. Therefore, transport is often the source of substantial environmental policy goal conflicts. Focusing on the environmental trade-offs highlights the dilemmas of sustainable transport. It serves as a methodological crucial case, testing the thesis of sustainable transport under its most difficult conditions, when a solution has controversial effects. Overcoming these conflicts means handling difficulties in political, administrative and academic priorities and concerns, and pave the way for more robust solutions also under the more likely, more beneficial conditions. The proposed project will be executed through four main research tasks relating to various stages in the transport-environment chain, focusing on the not so well-known linkages between urban, landscape, and transport topics: 1) on social drivers behind mobility, 2) on environmental and landscape cha nges, 3) on significant urban impacts, and 4) on policy processes for sustainable transport. The methodological approaches include research reviewing, innovative case studies, and use of administrative and secondary (survey) data.