Description
Description (EN): The Strategic urban region Eurodelta (SURE) comprises the lower river basins of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. A polycentric area, comprising a network of metropolises with medium-large cities and cross-border regions. In its capacity of an entrance gate for goods and persons to Europe, it has developed into a densely populated and economically strong area.
Within 3 hours of travel, over 50 million people can be reached. This makes it a global hub for goods, services and knowledge. This role has brought economic prosperity but also major territorial, environmental and liveability issues.
For instance, transport is responsible for a substantially large share of CO2 emissions in the region, with further increases forecasted, while EU ambitions and national climate debates or policy plans point to the need for a drastic reduction of them.
The Strategic urban region Eurodelta faces indeed major challenges: energy transition, climate adaptation, accommodation of economic and demographic growth, ensuring connectivity and accessibility of urban networks, and sustainable land use. Decarbonising the transport sector plays a crucial role in tackling these challenges.
The area has four internal national borders (NL-DE, NL-BE, BE-FR, DE-BE) that European integration and globalization have tended to abolish. These borders are crossed by people, goods or services and national and regional/local policy makers feel the urgency to collaborate more closely on policy solutions to address this wide range of flows and achieve more sustainable development.
The analysis considers the research area against its surroundings, but not in a static way. International flows can concern transport and secondary spatial flows to and from megacities in the ring around the SURE, like London, Paris or up to Frankfurt and Hamburg. This can give a measure of the strength of the relationship between the SURE and these cities.
Finally, responding to current events, it has become clear again that crises can affect transport severely. The COVID-19 crisis affects drastically, besides the health of people, free movement of persons and has a huge impact also on free movements of goods with the sudden and unexpected recurrence of borders. It could also bring an economic crisis. On the long term, we may face more sanatory crises, economic crises and crises of other kinds, e.g. energy or digital crises, which may affect cities, cross-border movements and transport.
Read more Achievements (EN): The baseline scenario shows that, with the overall expected growth of transport (+30% to 2030 and +59% towards 2050 for freight, +10% in 2030 and +18% in 2050 for passengers), sustainability appears to be far out of reach. The share of road for both freight and passengers as a dominant mode is striking (and not surprising). The transport flows are combined with expected developments in emissions, which slightly changes the picture regarding the focus and the opportunities at hand. On the other hand, when looking at the overall sustainability goals, the predominance of the car as the main mode of transport can be justified for example from a social inclusion perspective, displaying careful treating is necessary on this topic. Also due to the fact that the road network is congested and significant investments are necessary to alleviate specific bottlenecks, a focus on changing the way we travel is eminent. For freight an additionally complicating factor is the connection of transport with the seaside of transport, this is currently out of scope within this study, but the emissions from the seaside are (combined with air) forming a large part of the overall transport emissions. From a SURE area perspective, focusing on intermodality, but also
long-distance freight transport by train can change and adapt this focus and, in that sense, partly tackle the seaside emissions.
A STISE toolkit (see Annex 9)1 was built for better showing all the information (e.g. on maps) that is available within the datasets from Transtools3, and it offers the possibility to make the different selections depending on the interest and perspective of the user.
An external trend analysis indicates that the demand for freight transport in the SURE area is likely to decrease for all modes compared to the baseline scenario. This decrease is mainly due to growing circular economy and changes in the world freight routes (part of the further globalisation trend of the transport sector). For passenger transport the trends indicate a shift from air and road to rail compared to the baseline scenario, when the possible impact of autonomous vehicles (part of the trend on technical evolutions in the transport sector) is neglected. If autonomous vehicles became available on large scale, they might result in a large shift from public transport to car usage, depending on the implementation in the overall transport system. From the baseline scenario it became clear that without any intervention in the policies, sustainability will not be reached.
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Website: https://archive.espon.eu/
Expected Results (EN): The main outcomes of this project should be the following:
- Territorial evidence on the current and possible future impact of flows of persons and goods on the sustainable growth of urban regions within the SURE region as a whole (and with its surroundings as much as possible)
- Evidence on the contribution of current and estimation of the expected contribution of future territorial policies regarding sustainable transport infrastructure in the SURE to EU sustainable growth (including air quality, climate and energy targets).
- Evidence on how cooperation (cross-border, inter-metropolitan, inter-regional, inter-governmental) and governance contribute to achieving EU (transport) targets for sustainable growth for 2030 and 2050.
- Conclusions on the necessary policy, including governance and cooperation, perimeters in the SURE in the context of sustainable transport.
The project should also answer the following key policy questions:
- To which extent are the local, regional, national and international flows of persons and goods affecting the sustainable growth of SURE region? How could cross-border movement of people and goods develop in the period until 2030 and 2050, regarding different scenarios of societal, economic and political trends?
- To which extent do current or expected transport infrastructure and spatial policies (national complemented by regional) in the SURE contribute to EU (transport) targets for sustainable growth for 2030 and 2050?
- What could be done policy-wise, but also with concrete actions to better contribute to EU (transport) targets for sustainable growth for 2030 and 2050? By which policies and actions, at which level and scale?
- In particular, how can cross-border and inter-metropolitan cooperation contribute to achieving these targets?
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Thematic information
Specific Objective:
Upgraded knowledge transfer and use of analytical user support
Thematic Objective:
(11) enhancing institutional capacity of public authorities and stakeholders and efficient public administration through actions to strengthen the institutional capacity and the efficiency of public administrations and public services related to the implementation of the ERDF, and in support of actions under the ESF to strengthen the institutional capacity and the efficiency of public administration.
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Investment Priority:
(11 ETC) ETC specific for transnational cooperation: enhancing institutional capacity of public authorities and stakeholders and efficient public administration by developing and coordinating macro-regional and sea-basin strategies
