Mots clé policy integration; inter-institutional cooperation; cross-sectoral cooperation; strategies; capacity building; monitoring

 

The integration of the transport, health and environment sectors aims to ensure that health and environment are appropriately taken into account in transport policy and decision-making at national and local levels. Integration goes beyond the mere co-ordination of policies and involves joint work among the sectors to create synergies between policies, to share goals for their formulation and to assume responsibility for their implementation. It applies across different sectors (horizontally) as well as across different levels of government (vertically).

 

At the UNECE Regional Conference on Transport and the Environment held in 1997, Ministers decided to work towards a close integration of environment, health and transport policies at the local, national and international level. Ministers at the 1999 London Conference on Environment and Health emphasised further the need to involve environment and health authorities in decision-making on transport, land-use and infrastructure policies. In 2002, the Second High-Level Meeting on Transport, Environment and Health considered that cross-sectoral integration remains one of the main challenges for achieving sustainable and healthy transport and should constitute a priority area where further action should be pursued in the framework of THE PEP.

At the EU level, integration of environmental issues into other policy areas became a priority in the early 90’s and its importance was reaffirmed in the Sixth Environment Action Programme. Since 1997, environmental integration is a requirement under the EC Treaty (Article 6). It is put into practice through the “Cardiff process”, launched at the 1998 European Council, under which the different sectors are required to produce strategies for integrating environmental considerations into their respective activities. The need for policy integration has also been strongly advocated by the European Commission’s White Paper on Transport.

The integration of transport, environment and health is one of the four priority areas constituting THE PEP policy framework. It involves:

• Development, implementation and monitoring of national strategies or action plans for transport sustainable for health and the environment;
• Definition and adoption of environmental and health targets, identification of indicators for monitoring of the implementation and of impacts, development of reporting mechanisms;
• Dissemination of information, good practices and capacity building;
• Development of institutional mechanisms for integration of the environment and health concerns into transport policies, with participation of representatives of the health and environment sectors in the decision-making process at various levels;
• Development and implementation of administrative, regulatory and financial instruments in the Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA) and South-Eastern European countries to stimulate and enforce the production and use of vehicles and fuels with improved environmental and safety performance.