Climate Action 2012-2013

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
© Clarisse Linke - ITDP Brazil
TransOeste Bus Rapid Transit, Rio de Janeiro - BRT is one of the fastest
growing public transport systems because of its cost-effectiveness. Over
100 cities in the developing world have developed BRT corridors.
and services. Finally, transport accidents account for
1.4 million traffic fatalities per year and for about 15
million serious injuries.
But these negative effects can be reversed with
sound planning and investment. Sustainable transport
strategies have been demonstrated in a growing
number of cities and countries and shown to foster
more cost-effective and equitable economic growth
with a different mix of traffic, lower pollution and
greenhouse gases, and fewer adverse health impacts.
But taking sustainable transport to scale globally
requires a further shift in transport investment by
national and local governments from old-fashioned
road construction and fossil fuel subsidies to
investment in safe, complete streets and highways
designed for public and non-motorised transport,
with traffic management and operations, and green
freight strategies. It also requires development of
related institutional capacity for sustainable transport
planning, development, regulations and policymaking
and operations.
Engaging the capacity of the world’s major
development finance institutions, such as regional
development banks and the World Bank, will
be very helpful to scaling up global sustainable
transport. These institutions lend approximately
US$30 billion a year for transport and could
help shape national development plans, policies
and infrastructure finance programmes, which
invest, together with the private sector, well over a
trillion dollars a year in transport infrastructure and
services. This effort could be even more effective if
co-ordinated with actions to educate and engage
national transport, housing, urban development,
environment, health, finance and foreign ministries
in support of sustainable transport.
VOLUNTARY COMMITMENTS AND
GLOBAL TARGETS
Rio+20, the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable
Development, celebrated the 20-year anniversary of
the historic Earth Summit in 1992, where countries
signed Agenda 21, a blueprint for action in the
three pillars of sustainable development: economic
growth, social equity and environmental protection.
Major international processes such as the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change came
out of the earlier summit. The 2012 conference
was not considered as successful as the first one
because countries did not agree on decisive actions
© Cornie Huizenga, SLOCAT
Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda announces pledge of $175
Billion for sustainable transport initiatives on behalf of 8 multilateral development
banks during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012
beyond a declaration of good intentions. However,
Rio+20 was often framed as a conference about
implementation and there was a strong focus on
voluntary commitments to advance concrete actions
to achieve sustainable development.
For the transport sector, Rio+20 has been
categorised as a ‘game-changer’ – the moment
when sustainable transport was finally recognised
by the international community as having the
same importance as other sectors such as energy
or water. The transport sector community
together contributed to more than 15 voluntary
commitments for sustainable transport finance,
policy-making, capacity development and knowledge
development and sharing. The most important of
these commitments was advanced by the world’s
eight largest multilateral development banks (MDBs).
Together, they pledged to spend at least US$175
billion on more sustainable transport projects in the
next decade with annual reporting and monitoring.
Rio+20 served also as a catalyst for the international
transport community to develop a series of global
targets with the aim of proposing sustainable
transport as an official Sustainable Development
Goal (SDG) in order to play a key role in the
post-2015 global development agenda, which will
be developed as a continuation of the Millennium
Development Goals. An expert working group
convened by the Partnership on Sustainable
Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), which brings
together 68 organisations including UN agencies,
MDBs, NGOs and international research bodies,
proposed the consideration of a sustainable transport
sustainable development goal: ‘Universal Access to
Safe, Clean and Affordable Transport’.
Related targets identified by the SLoCaT
working group might include the following:
Ensure that the proportion of the urban and
rural poor for whom mobility problems
severely restrict access to employment and
essential services should be halved by 2030
compared with 2010;
Maintain the 2010 share of personal trips
by public and non-motorised transport for
countries currently above 50 per cent, and
where this share is currently below 50 per cent,
achieve at least a 10 per cent gain by 2025;
Support the Decade of Action for Road
Safety (2011-20) and its objective to cut
climateactionprogramme.org 115