Over a few recent decades, there have been an increasing demand on the protection of both of the natural and man-made environment, and it became a fundamental requirement all over the world. The various engineering structures are used, for the most part, to meet basic economic and social demands, at the same time, causing more or less detriment to the environment. This duality is also characteristic of the transport infrastructure where the environment is endangered not only by the occupation of areas on account of setting up a certain facility, but by the emissions due to vehicular traffic too.

In the course of the design process, there are a number of opportunities offering themselves for selecting the optimum technical solution whereat the basic project objective can be met, but the environment suffers as less detriment as possible.

In Hungary, the Act of Environment Protection has been effective since 1976, and UVATERV Ltd. was the first to pay a privileged attention (for instance, by elaborating an own handbook for design of environmental protection) to the validation of goals of the relevant law in its designs. By now, the proper legal framework has been formed and a group of specialists have been specialised to actively validate environmental protection aspects, and - in the case of unavoidable conflicts - to design proper passive protection systems.

The environmental investigations and, where applicable, the designs of protection corresponding to the given phase of design are always worked out in support of every technical documentation prepared by UVATERV. They are as follows:

• Preliminary and detailed environmental impact assessments,
• Environmental designs for approval and final detail designs,
• Area sensitivity investigations,
• Planting designs.

Engineers specialised in environmental protection direct the work, and experts in acoustics, biology, ecology and landscaping are employed in it.