Técnicas Rodoviárias adaptadas às mudanças climáticas: Selecção e avaliação

Road pavements construction is considered to have high consumption of energy and natural resources, and to produce high quantity of green house gases emission. The European commission has established the goal of reducing at least 20% of energy consumption and green house gases emission till 2020 to combat climate change, known as the "20-20-20" targets. Some French, Portuguese and Spanish entities have been working together, under the European funded cooperation and research project TRACC - Road Techniques Adapted to Climate Change, to select and evaluate existing and new road paving techniques in order to reduce socio-economic and environmental impacts. This paper presents the selection and evaluation of each country techniques that were considered as potentially environmentally friendly. The techniques were evaluated according to the following criteria: construction conditions, resources preservation, energy consumption, technical characteristics, social impacts and economic cost. Existing techniques evaluation was based on each country experience while for new techniques some work trials have been carried out in Spain and France.