The UIC Ecoscoring project was kicked off in January 2019 at the joint requests of UIC Chairman and the UIC General Management with the overarching aim of providing the UIC members with a supportive tool not only to measure rail’s overall progress in environmental, societal and governance performances, but also to enable UIC member companies to do the same, by producing a simple dashboard with benchmarks next to best practice to ensure the trends (at company and sector levels) are evolving towards improvement of rail’s overall ESG performances to enable the much needed shift towards a greener economy.
UIC has adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as a widely accepted standard
To produce the progress reports, a decision was made to base the tool on the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership and are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 providing a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.
Ecoscoring will be beneficial for railway companies
Even though it is well known that rail’s performance is good in terms of environmental footprint and energy efficiency, by gathering the measured results on a synoptic dashboard, UIC’s Ecoscoring will help railways in a simple, yet robust way to show the sector performance against the SDGs. Individual companies will thus be able to take advantage of other UIC members experience and good practice in order to improve their own contribution to the SDGs over time.
June 2020 achievements: Rail-relevant KPIs selected to produce progress report
The tool will process aggregated data recorded by UIC members on the one hand, and KPIs already collected in the various UIC databases on the other, in order to produce a sector progress report. The KPIs used in the tool were selected after consultation of experts and circulation among the UIC members and have been adjusted in order to accurately meet the specificities of all activities of the rail sector while at the same time demonstrating the sector’s and individual companies’ contribution to the achievement of the selected rail-relevant SDGs and corresponding targets.
Ecoscoring will help railway projects access green funding opportunities
As SDGs have become the world standard on achieving sustainability at all levels of society, this tool is designed to become a sector standard to communicate on rail’s sustainability and as a result, to help improving rail’s access to green funding opportunities.
