Rail environmental report

This report highlights the ways in which rail is helping to create a more sustainable future, and examines the relationship between rail operations and the environment. It is a valuable contribution to discussions on the role that rail can play in greening transport. This report aims to reach a large audience. A total of 9 out of 10 Europeans consider climate change a very serious or fairly serious problem. Climate change is a reality that is affecting European citizens more frequently and more severely. Natural disasters driven by climate change, such as extreme heatwaves and fires, heavy rainfall and flooding, heavy snowfall, and thunderstorms, severely test the transport system's resilience. Those events can become even more challenging to handle when combined with the expected increase in demand for rail transport and the shortage of rail network capacity. From economic and environmental perspectives, a robust, resilient and reliable transport system is fundamental to ensure the welfare and the right to mobility of Europeans. To achieve a resilient transport system, reinforcing multimodality by ensuring the better integration of the transport modes and establishing interoperability at all levels of the transport system is vital. This rail environmental report is the first produced by the European Union Agency for Railways but will not be the last. The agency is committed to monitoring the railway sector's development in relation to the environmental imperatives and plans to issue this report every 3 years.