Sustainability

The sustainability impact area addresses the implications of CCAM, assessing specifically the impacts on environmental integrity, social well-being, and economic vitality. It examines the capacity of CCAM to meet current needs, while not compromising resource and opportunity availability for future generations.

Sustainability refers to a global state where present needs are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It includes three dimensions—environmental, social, and economic—consistent with the United Nations Brundtland Commission’s 1987 definition of sustainable development.

For CCAM to contribute to sustainability, it must be deployed in a way that promotes sustainability across as many impact areas as possible rather than deteriorate it. A comprehensive consideration of CCAM’s impacts across various impact areas provides insights into its overall sustainability.

The outputs from most other impact areas can be used when evaluating the sustainability impacts of CCAM. CCAM is likely to have positive effects in some areas and negative in others, and these impacts may vary between the societal scenarios under consideration. The sustainability impact area is thus an integrated evaluation of all impacts addressed within EU-CEM (see the next figure).

The sustainability chapter provides guidance on summarising, visualising, and interpreting the results of CCAM impact assessments from a sustainability perspective. It is important to note that this chapter does not determine whether a CCAM system is absolutely sustainable; rather, it examines changes in sustainability relative to the baseline scenario chosen for the impact assessments. Thus, the analysis indicates whether CCAM is more or less sustainable than the existing transport system for the defined societal scenarios.