«The Contracting Parties shall pursue a comprehensive policy for the preservation and protection of the Alps by applying the principles of prevention, payment by the polluter (the ‘polluter pays’ principle) and cooperation, after careful consideration of the interests of all the Alpine States, their Alpine regions and the European Economic Community, and through the prudent and sustained use of resources.»
(Alpine Convention, art. 2)
«In order to assess the capability of the Alpine Countries to fulfill in a short time the objectives of the Convention (…) it is necessary to identify (…) the policies (and) the agreements among the Alpine Countries, that generate the most direct consequences on transport costs, that imply specific environmental constraints or particular norms concerning traffic in the Alps: in order to get the expected results of the Transport Protocol it will be necessary to intervene on these tools.»
(Report of the President of the Transport Working Group established by the VI Alpine Conference for the exchange of information and experiences aimed at the fulfillment of chapter IV of the Transport Protocol of the Alpine Convention, presented at the Alpine Conference in Merano in 2002.)
«Transport Working Group will act as a platform for gathering information in order to share all the needed data, aiming both at a good evaluation of the implementation of the Transport Protocol and at the information of the public.»
(Mandate of the Transport Working Group of the Alpine Convention, approved by the Alpine Conference in Merano in 2002)
«That paper contributed to set up a proposal for a methodological approach to a quantitative assessment of external costs in three transalpine corridors (Fréjus, Gotthard and Brenner) and was accepted as a first step in the methodological approach dealing with the delicate issue of external costs assessment and coverage.»
(Introduction, Working Group Transport of the Alpine Convention, Sub-Group “Costs of transport” Final Report) | 
