Sustainable Development Week: another step towards sustainable transport

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Sustainable mobility makes an entrance at the 8th Edition of Sustainable Development Week, which takes place from the 1st to the 8th April 2010. With the slogan "Go sustainable, it works ", various shows, exhibitions and educational displays will be promoting green acts. And for the "travel differently" theme, people will be able to find out about the "ecological" uses of mobility.

The aim of this new edition of Sustainable Development Week is to portray ecology as accessible and  "easy", through all kinds of events (screenings, educational workshops, exhibitions, conferences…).

Although the main public transport players, the SNCF and the RATP, are both partners of Sustainable Development Week, there’s a newcomer in GART*, which is participating in the event for the first time.

GART has published an educational booklet for the occasion - entitled "I’m getting involved in sustainable mobility!" it highlights new mobility uses, such as fuel-efficient driving or car pooling, in practical terms. The important thing is thus to be able to identify the means of transport that emit the least CO2 emissions and are the best adapted to one’s requirements. 

The week is organised by the Minister for Sustainable Development and serves to remind people of the important breakthroughs made since the Grenelle** environmental round tables, such as the ‘bonus-malus’*** for buying a clean vehicle. The percentage of sales of vehicles with CO2 emissions below 140 g/km has thus more than doubled in 7 years and represented, in 2008, 63% of the market.

With more than 3,300 events, and the involvement of various protagonists (businesses, public sector organisations, associations), Sustainable Development Week shows that interest in environmental problems is still growing. Green gestures to help fight climate change now appear to be easily accessible.

* GART is a French association of transport authorities

** The Grenelle agreement on the environment’ comes from a series of round tables/conferences in autumn 2007, attended by representatives of central/local government, employer organizations and trade unions and NGOs, and which various environmental themes were debated in order to define future sustainable development policy in France.

*** the French ‘bonus-malus’ system rewards (bonus) purchasers of environmentally-friendly new cars and penalises (malus) those buying cars emitting high levels of CO2