Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

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• Sustainable Development
• Climate Change
• Climate Change Adaptation
• Climate Change Mitigation
• Facts, Figures and Resources

Sustainable Development

Sustainability is founded on bringing full and lasting economic, social and environmental benefits. Our challenge is twofold; to ensure our network and the surrounding environment are fit for present and future generations, and to make sure our activities and practices have as little adverse impact as possible on people and the wider environment.

Our progress towards delivering sustainable development requires cooperation and involvement from all areas of our business and supply chain to be successful.  We need to work with partner organisations with an interest in the strategic road network both from the point of view of its operation and its impacts.  Importantly we need to ensure that the views of communities neighbouring our network form a part of our decision making processes.

Road transport has a vital role in supporting economic recovery.  The strategic road network carries a third of all vehicle traffic and two thirds of all freight journeys in England.  Our network is an integral part of our national way of life facilitating links between communities and to leisure and cultural centres.  We understand this doesn't come without cost to the environment or communities adjacent to our network.

The Highways Agency faces long-term challenges in improving reliability and tackling capacity constraints against a backdrop of increasing construction costs, environmental concerns and growing traffic volumes. Finding the right balance between measures to make better use of the existing network and prioritising network improvements which support economic growth will be a key challenge for us over the coming years.

We must:

• Consider and adapt to predicted climate change impacts and contribute to the legislative requirements for reducing carbon emissions.
• Understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the materials and energy we procure and influence.
• Consider the whole life implications of infrastructure investment, the sourcing of materials and their use, reuse, and disposal.

The purpose of the Highways Agency's Sustainable Development Plan is to support the Highways Agency Strategic Plan and to set out the direction we intend to take to mainstream sustainable development into the Agency's core processes.. It puts the emphasis on embedding sustainability into all of our decision making and working practices and ensuring that our staff and supply chain have a consistent understanding of sustainable development.  This means we are beginning to move on from primarily managing impacts to making sustainability central to the future direction and decision making of the Agency