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.
This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UIDB/05757/2020.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
European Commission: EU mobility package: Europe on the move briefing note. http://nws.eurocities.eu/MediaShell/media/EuropeonthemoveBriefingnote.pdf. Accessed 10 Mar 2020
European Commission: Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council setting CO2 emission performance standards for new heavy duty vehicles (2011). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2018:185:FIN
European Commission: White Paper on Transport: Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area: Towards a Competitive and Resource-efficient Transport System. Publications Office of the European Union (2011)
About the Sustainable Development Goals. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. Accessed 13 Mar 2020
Gudmundsson, H., Regmi, M.B.: Developing the sustainable urban transport index. Transport and Communications Bulletin for Asia and the Pacific No. 87 (2017)
Cherchye, L., Moesen, W., Rogge, N., Van Puyenbroeck, T.: An introduction to ‘benefit of the doubt’ composite indicators. Soc. Ind. Res. 82(1), 111–145 (2007)
Danielis, R., Rotaris, L., Monte, A.: Composite indicators of sustainable urban mobility: estimating the rankings frequency distribution combining multiple methodologies. Int. J. Sustain. Transp. 12, 380–395 (2018)
Joint Research Centre-European Commission: Handbook on constructing composite indicators: methodology and user guide. OECD publishing (2008)
Mitchell, G., May, A., McDonald, A.: PICABUE: a methodological framework for the development of indicators of sustainable development. Int. J. Sustain. Dev. World Ecol. 2(2), 104–123 (1995)
Alonso, A., Monzón, A., Cascajo, R.: Comparative analysis of passenger transport sustainability in European cities. Eco. Ind. 48, 578–592 (2015)
Reisi, M., Aye, L., Rajabifard, A., Ngo, T.: Transport sustainability index: Melbourne case study. Ecol. Ind. 43, 288–296 (2014)
Zito, P., Salvo, G.: Toward an urban transport sustainability index: an European comparison. Eur. Transp. Res. Rev. 3(4), 179–195 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12544-011-0059-0
Lu, M., Xie, R., Chen, P., Zou, Y., Tang, J.: Green transportation and logistics performance: an improved composite index. Sustainability 11(10), 2976 (2019)
Charnes, A., Cooper, W.W., Rhodes, E.: Measuring the efficiency of decision making units. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 2(6), 429–444 (1978)
Fried, H.O., Lovell, C.A.K., and Schmidt, S.S.: The measurement of productive efficiency: Techniques and applications, 3–67. Oxford University Press (1993)
Chung, W.: Using DEA model without input and with negative input to develop composite indicators. In: International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), pp. 2010–2013. IEEE (2017)
Cherchye, L., et al.: Creating composite indicators with DEA and robustness analysis: the case of the Technology Achievement Index. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 59(2), 239–251 (2008)
Dyson, R.G., Allen, R., Camanho, A.S., Podinovski, V.V., Sarrico, C.S., Shale, E.A.: Pitfalls and protocols in DEA. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 132(2), 245–259 (2001)
Wong, Y.H., Beasley, J.E.: Restricting weight flexibility in data envelopment analysis. J. Oper. Res. Soc. 41(9), 829–835 (1990)
Färe, R., Karagiannis, G., Hasannasab, M., Margaritis, D.: A benefit-of-the-doubt model with reverse indicators. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 278(2), 394–400 (2019)
European Commission - Renewable energy directive, https://ec.europa.eu/energy/topics/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-directive/overview. Accessed 21 Mar 2020
Eurostat Database. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database. Accessed 20 Mar 2020
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gruetzmacher, S.B., Vaz, C.B., Ferreira, Â.P. (2020). Environmental Performance Assessment of the Transport Sector in the European Union. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020. ICCSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12251. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58808-3_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58808-3_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58807-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58808-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)