Draft working paper Detailed description of the chains of causalities of environmental impacts

COST 356: EST - Towards the definition of a measurable environmentally sustainable transport

WG 2: Environmental assessment (indicators as measurement tools)

Task 2.1: Analysis of the chain of causalities for each environmental impact

DRAFT working paper Detailed description of the chains of causalities of environmental impacts

Robert Joumard, Gerassimos Arapis & Tomasz Zacharz

8 October 2007

The main purpose of the task 2.1 is to analyse the chain of causalities for the full range of transport-related impacts on humans and ecosystems, from the driving parameters of the long-term dynamics of the transportation system to the final impacts, starting for instance from the 16 impact categories listed in the summary of WG3 of COST 350. In parallel to COST 350 or later, different lists of impacts categories have been designed, whose some are given in section 1.

What are the impacts on environment? What are their characteristics or typical features? The answer to these questions, i.e. the taking into account of all environmental impacts and the description of the chain of causalities from the source to each final impact allows us to define what we want to measure with indicators of environmental impacts. At the same time, it allows to define quite precisely the term 'environment'.

An exhaustive list of the impacts is necessary to present a full picture. The description of the chain of causalities for each impact, especially in terms of sources, intermediate and final targets, mechanisms between sources and final targets allow to express clearly what each potential indicator measures and does not measure and on which scientific mechanisms an indicator should be based (the indicators per impact are studied in task 2.3. 'indicators per impact').

It is the reason why, in a first step (section 1), we present different lists of impacts, as found in the literature or defined previously within the action, and some potential indicators per impact.

In a second step, we propose a new and detailed list of impacts (section 2), with the potential indicators for each of them (section 3). In a third step (section 4), we propose a more aggregated list of impacts.