On June 20, 2013, the 44th meeting of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)’s Governing Council approved a  $369.82 million Work Program, consisting of 48 project concepts and two programmatic approaches.  The Work Program includes a World Bank sustainable transport project in Russian Federation titled “National Urban Transport Improvement Project.”  For the project, the GEF finances 9.1 million USD grant with co-finance of 270 million USD.  The project aims to improve the quality and condition of urban transport and to reduce adverse environmental impacts in three cities (St. Petersburg, Lipetsk and Balashikha) in Russia, through physical investments, operational and technological improvements, and legal reforms.  The project will also strengthen the institutional and technical capacity in several Russian cities in planning and managing urban transport systems.

The innovative aspect of the project is to pilot sustainable urban transport programs corresponding to the three types of cities and reflect the experience of the pilot projects into a national framework for improvement of urban transport systems.  Through the national framework, the outcomes and outputs of the project will be replicated in other cities.  The direct CO2 emission reductions are estimated to be approximately 1 million tonnes CO2 over the project duration.

As a next step, the World Bank is going to develop a detailed project proposal for the GEF CEO endorsement.  The information on the project is available at: http://www.thegef.org/gef/project_detail?projID=5396