Sustainable Transport: What Role in the Global Development and Climate Agenda?

Sustainable Transport: What Role in the Global Development and Climate Agenda?

Sustainable transport strategies are crucial to 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 Africa, undermining sustainable development. Weak institutional capacity and governance and ineffective financing and policies 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?

How can the momentum on Sustainable Transport realized at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Transport (Rio+20) in June 2012 be used to mobilize (a) the African Development Bank’s efforts on sustainable transport in the African region, and (b) a regional intergovernmental process on Environmentally Sustainable Transport in the African region.

Program:

Welcome: Aymen Osman Ali, African Development Bank

• Sustainable Transport and its integration in global policies on sustainable development and climate change. Cornie Huizenga, Joint Convener, Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport.
• A regional Environmentally Sustainable Transport Forum for Africa. Heather Allen, Transport Research Laboratory, Programme Director Sustainable Transport.
• Developing a sustainable transport approach for the African Development Bank. Ali Aymen A. Osman, Principal Transport Engineer, OITC.2, AfDB
• Questions and Answers, Discussion