Report

Monitoring CO2 abatement efforts in the traffic and transport sector

The Dutch Transport ministry has implemented a range of policy measures to reduce traffic and transport CO2 emissions, often in collaboration with other departments. Over the past few years a growing need has been felt to improve understanding of the actual impact of these various policies. At the ministry’s request CE therefore inventoried and assessed current government practice vis-à-vis ex-post monitoring of traffic and transport CO2 abatement policies.

This report first describes the role of ex-post monitoring in the overall policy cycle and the criteria such monitoring should ideally fulfil. For each of the various policy tools and packages currently in place the current status of government monitoring efforts is then reviewed.

The study concludes that while almost all policy tools and procedures employed in recent years have been subjected to some form of ex-post monitoring, many of these programmes do not yet meet the criteria identified. A number of practical recommendations are given for improving the situation, at both the ‘macro’-level, where there is scope for enhancing the coherence of the various programmes, for example, and the ‘micro’-level, where individual programmes can also be bettered.

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