Shanghai, July 24 2014

The final report of the Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which concluded in the early hours of 19 July in New York, represents a major breakthrough for the sustainable transport community.

For the first time, a very significant group of governments have agreed on a global vision for sustainable development, which specifically acknowledges the contribution that sustainable transport can make in realizing commonly agreed upon goals on food security, health, energy, infrastructure development, urban development, sustainable consumption and production as well as climate change.  The fact that transport related targets are included in seven out of the seventeen proposed SDGs illustrates the cross cutting role that transport has in sustainable development.

The outcome of the OWG process will be a very large boost for the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT) in realizing its objective to promote the integration of sustainable transport in global policies on sustainable development. SLoCaT is very much encouraged to see that the role of multi-stakeholder partnerships like SLoCaT has been explicitly acknowledged in the final report of the OWG.

Plase see full-text of SLoCaT’s response to the OWG Outcome Document