Pronet (project)

Pollution Reduction Options NETwork (Pronet)is a European Commission funded project (No SSPE-CT-2007-044159) under the EU 6FP PRIORITY 8.1 Policy oriented research, scientific support to policies. The duration of the project is 36 months. The project started on January 1, 2007, and will end on December 31, 2009.

The main objective of the Pronet project is to facilitate exchange and evaluation of interventions on environment and health exposure reduction measures on a regional level and promote implementation of successful initiatives in other regions of Europe. This project will focus on the exchange of useful practices in two areas:

• Improvement of indoor air quality (Work Package 1)
• The reduction of traffic-related health hazards, such as air pollution and noise (Work Package 2)

Finally, the obtained results will be disseminated among stakeholders across Europe (Work Package 3). As they are key areas in environmental policy, the health of the population will benefit significantly from exposure reduction measures. The results will be used to make recommendations for policies at regional level.

Some examples of policy suggestions that are studied in Pronet include

• Strengthening the local public transport by regional optimisations

  It is proposed to optimise public transport interfaces, to ensure a better coordination by setting up local public transport timetables, to adopt air pollution control aims in local and regional public transport plans, and in line with this to define precise environmental standards for public transport vehicles.

• Municipal coordination by implementation of transport-related measures

  Because of its importance for the regional air control planning, both truck route concepts and city logistic concepts should be coordinated between the cities. This ensures that consisting or ongoing concepts intertwine efficiently. The development of a regional concept for "Güterverteilerzentren"centres to distribute goods was also proposed as an appropriate measure reducing the burden of traffic in inner cities.

Pronet is also collecting information on case studies on related topics to enhance collaboration and networking.

• KTL has completed and submitted the PRONET questionnaire for the Helsinki congestion charging zone case study (carried out in INTARESE WP3.1).

See also

• The official website of Pronet