Seminar-Sustainable Transport: Role of the IDB’s Strategy in Global Development and the Climate Agenda

Sustainable transport strategies are crucial to global development, boosting equity of access to opportunities and economic development, cutting public health costs of air pollution and traffic accidents, and curbing greenhouse gas emissions at a net negative cost to society. But unmanaged motorization remains the dominant model of development across much of the world, including in the Latin American and Caribbean region thereby undermining s
ustainable development.

Weak institutional capacity and governance often go hand in hand with ineffective financing and policy, together they block rapid scale-up of proven sustainable transport strategies.

A United Nations global consultation process is underway about a post-2015 Development Framework and possible Sustainable Development Goals to replace or augment expiring Millennium Development Goals. And the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, established through recent global climate negotiations, is developing by 2015 a post-2020 framework for climate action.

How might the transport sector’s role as a building block for sustainable development be recognized in the post-2015 sustainable development framework? How might the transport sector be dealt with in the post-2020 global climate framework? What role could MDBs play to advance global sustainable transport? Is there a need for transport sector-focused strategies to limit the long-term lock-in of unsustainable transport and urban development investments?

IDB is currently updating its Regionally Environmentally Sustainable Transport (REST) Strategy with the aim to better serve its member countries in their efforts to mainstream and scale up sustainable transport.

Program:

• Opening remarks – Nestor Roa, Transport Division Chief
• The contribution of sustainable transport to the post 2015 development framework and global climate change mitigation – Cornie Huizenga, Joint Convener Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport
• Update REST strategy – Rafael Acevedo, REST Coordinator
• Questions & Answers