The Future of Sustainable Freight Transport and Logistics

This note reviews recent trends in EU freight transport and evaluates the current EU approach to the development of a sustainable freight transport system. It then considers the likely impact of existing and potential initiatives to promote sustainability. For various reasons it will be more difficult to achieve sustainability for freight than for personal transport. Existing technologies and policies will only go part-way towards a full solution and new more radical initiatives will be required in the future. The issues covered by this note were presented and discussed in the framework of the workshop on 'The Future of Transport' held in the European Parliament on 2 December 2009.