The Beacon project addressed the broad issue of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of transport infrastructure. Beacon directly addresses all major societal challenges that the European continent is currently facing:
environment
employment
education
- working conditions
- quality of life in general.
The project's main objectives were to:
- establish a platform for discussion that, by bringing together all categories of involved stakeholders, can lead to achieving consensus on concepts, methodologies and practice of SEA applied to transport infrastructure;
- provide explicit opportunities to link research results to policy making;
- ensure that the appropriate level of dissemination of research results is reached, notably targeting policy makers and practitioners;
- issue methodological recommendations on SEA in the transport sector;
- identify and illustrate examples of best practice in transport SEA;
- provide support to the implementation of SEA for selected sections of the Trans-Europe Network (TEN-T).
By the end of the Beacon project, four important sources were developed to address major societal challenges in the assessment of transport infrastructure:
- an updated, comparative appraisal of the current state of development of SEA across the EU (illustrated in the relevant deliverables and in selected technical papers);
- the achievement of consensus (within the Beacon network, which includes representatives of both the research and the policy community, from a large number of EU Member States) on a variety of critical issues associated to the adoption of SEA in the transport sector (illustrated in the 'statements' issued at the end of each main Beacon event);
- The production of the new Transport SEA manual, reflecting the above consensus;
- The demonstration, through selected examples, of how SEA can support transport planning, notably in the framework of the TEN-T development (illustrated in the relevant deliverable).