The Italian Ministry of the Environment and Sapienza University are working together on sustainable mobility projects for both university students and staff. A Memorandum of Understanding signed on November 21, 2017 by Environment Minister Gian Luca Galletti and Sapienza Rector Eugenio Gaudio sets the objectives for shared mobility, smart working, alternative fuels, and the use of electric vehicles and bicycles to move between the university and home.

“This is the beginning of a collaboration,” explained Minister Galletti, “that I am certain will be very useful for the City of Rome and the environment. We will act, in coherence with the objectives described in the National Energetic Strategy Document,” adds the minister, “to promote a new idea of sustainable transport, starting with the thousands of young men and women that come to and leave the university every day. The direction we provide today will lead to fewer emissions and a better quality of life both for students and the citizens of Rome.”

“I believe that this agreement,” stated Sapienza Rector Eugenio Gaudio, “represents an important step in the university community’s involvement in an environmentally-respectful mobility. The challenge for a society with a smaller footprint concerns every citizen’s ethical dimension and calls for a new educational model. And universities must be at the forefront in this process.”

More specifically, the Ministry and the University will work on pilot projects for cycling mobility, assigning free use of bikes and e-bikes to students, shared mobility initiatives for staff and students and testing of electric vehicles with the installation of recharging stations at the university. Other objectives indicated in the agreement include the development of infrastructure for fuelling vehicles using bio-fuels, hydrogen and bi-modal vehicles, as well as digital technology to evaluate the environmental performance of sustainable movements.

The Agreement

The agreement signed on November 21, 2017 mentions the international agreements signed by Italy from the Cop21 Paris Agreement on Climate to the Antismog Protocol signed on December 30, 2015 by the Ministry of the Environment, the Conference of Regions and ANCI to promote measures preventing and reducing pollutants in urban areas and “identifying specific measures to encourage a shift towards low-emission public transport.”

The protocol also mentions the 2017 ISPRA data pointing to the fact that on-road transports contribute to ca. 13% of particulate emissions and 50% of nitrogen oxide emission as atmospheric pollutants in Italy. The document also states that Sapienza has been committed for “years in national and EU projects and programmes on alternative fuels, urban goods mobility and mobility management.”