From 7 to 9 July 2025, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) held its annual Working Party on Transport Statistics meeting at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This event provided an opportunity to review the progress made over the past year in various priority areas, particularly with regard to the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In line with SDG 13 (Climate Action), special focus was placed on tracking key performance indicators for reducing inland transport emissions.
The secretariat briefed member states on the decarbonisation strategy of the Inland Transport Committee (ITC), which was adopted in 2024 with the aim of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. As part of this effort, the working party (WP.6) manages inland transport emissions data, enabling monitoring across different modes of inland transport (i.e. road, rail, inland waterways, and pipelines) and energy types. Currently, the working party does not collect data directly, but instead relies on the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), developed and maintained by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). The International Energy Agency (IEA) provides EDGAR’s primary data sources; UIC, for its part, supplies the IEA with rail sector data on energy consumption and related variables.
A representative from JRC presented findings on trends in inland transport emissions since 1990 across UNECE member states. Comparative analyses were also shared, contrasting EDGAR’s estimates with those from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Interestingly, EDGAR tends to overestimate rail fossil CO2 (tailpipe) emissions in the EU-27, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Canada, whereas the UNFCCC underestimates them – a discrepancy requiring further investigation.
Moreover, the secretariat highlighted that current transport emissions data is often incomplete, fragmented, and inconsistent across different countries, limiting the accuracy of the sector’s climate impact assessments and policy design. It therefore recommended building on existing UNECE mechanisms and enhancing international cooperation in order to strengthen data collection, harmonisation, and sharing.
During the meeting, other SDG-related topics were also addressed, including transport connectivity assessments, data collection on electric vehicle charging infrastructure, urban rail transport, and pipeline transport statistics. Through this dedicated microsite, launched in January 2025, SDG progress for inland transport in Europe can be tracked.
Additional discussions covered a range of subjects – for example, Eurostat shared its efforts to align the EU’s standard goods classification for transport statistics (NST 2007) with UIC’s Harmonised Commodity Code (NHM).
Representatives from various organisations, including Eurostat, the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), and the International Transport Forum (ITF), presented their work on related issues. Meanwhile, UIC shared its railway workforce data, featuring indicators analysed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). These appear in a technical report on “decent work in the railway sector”, to be presented at a technical meeting in Geneva from 1 to 5 September 2025.
This data helps assess progress towards a just transition, covering indicators such as:
- Gender, age, and seniority distributions
- The average age of staff by gender
- The company age structure (population pyramid format)
To read more about the event, please follow the links below:
https://unece.org/info/Transport/Transport-Statistics/events/398288
https://unece.org/transporttransport-statistics/database
