At HLPF 2026, water and energy were described as the ‘delivery system’ for every other Sustainable Development Goal. But Infrastrucutre, cities, water and energy don’t deliver themselves; transport does. Transport moves the pipes, ships the panels, supplies the clinics, gets food to markets, gets people to work, school, hospitals. And yet transport has no global goal of its own. In New York, we started to do something about that.
Every year the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) opens with the same ritual: a stocktake of where the Sustainable Development Goals actually stand. As the United Nations platform for the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) this is to be expected.. This year’s reading was sobering. Roughly a third of targets with reliable data are on track. The rest are slipping, and one in seven has fallen below where it sat in 2015. With less than four years to the 2030 deadline, the arithmetic is getting harder to ignore.
The forum then turned to its two goals under formal review, water (SDG 6) and energy (SDG 7), which the plenary framed as the foundation the other goals are built on. The picture on both was one of real but uneven progress. Access to water, sanitation and hygiene has expanded for millions since 2015, but at the current pace universal access arrives roughly two decades late, with more than two billion people still without safely managed drinking water. On energy, falling renewable costs are letting more countries generate their own power, but generation is not the same as access, and affordability remains the quiet barrier that household data tends to miss.
The goal that was never written
Water and energy are essential. But they don’t deliver themselves. Pipes must be transported. Panels must be transported. Supplies must be transported. Food must reach markets through transport. People must reach work, school, hospitals through transport. Transport is the infrastructure that makes every other SDG possible. Yet it has no global goal of its own. The connective tissue running underneath water, energy, health, food and climate resilience is transport, and transport is the one system in that list with no goal of its own. It sits scattered across a handful of targets, mentioned everywhere and owned nowhere.
That absence is a strategic and critical gap, and it is why we spent HLPF week starting a different conversation. Against the backdrop of the water and energy reviews, we used the forum to advance the case for a global goal for transport across several events, each doing a different job.
At the UNDESA special event on the UN Decade of Sustainable Transport, we made the case head-on: the Decade gives transport a ten-year mandate, but a mandate is not a target. A global goal is what turns 2026 to 2035 into measurable ambition rather than a decade of good intentions.
Our partner side event, on the Decade and on monitoring, was built to be a conversation rather than a broadcast. Less podium, more exchange, with partners trading what is genuinely working in their own contexts and, just as importantly, how progress actually gets measured. It is the kind of session that rarely produces a headline and often produces the useful thing: a clearer sense of where practice is ahead of policy.
The global goal working session, co-hosted with ITDP in the margins of the forum, went after the harder question. Not “is transport important”, which everyone in the room already agreed on, but what a global transport goal should actually contain, whether it can be tied to measurable targets, and whether it would change a single government decision. That is where the shape below started to emerge.
Early days, and doing it in the right order
This is genuinely early. What New York offered was not a finished goal but the start of the groundwork, and we were deliberate about doing it in the right order rather than leaping to an answer.
First, the criteria and the audience. Before wording anything, the group worked through what a global goal actually needs to do and who it is for. The short version on audience is everyone, but everyone in service of one primary audience: national and city governments, with the wider ecosystem of partners, industry and civil society there to support and hold them to it. A goal that speaks to everyone equally tends to move no one, so getting this straight first matters.
Then, existing targets. We have no interest in starting from a blank page. There is already a good deal to build on, from the commitments made at COP30 to the Avoid-Shift-Improve framework that underpins so much of this work, and part of the session was mapping what already exists so a future goal reinforces it rather than competing with it. We also looked hard at the energy world, where recent global goals on renewables and efficiency offer real lessons, both in what to reach for and in what makes a target actually bite.
From there, a loose framing. Out of that discussion came the beginnings of a direction, captured for now in a rough shorthand around expanding access while cutting emissions and energy use, grounded in Avoid-Shift-Improve. It is a starting point for consultation, not a position, and the exact structure, wording and numbers are all still open. The next steps are to test and refine it with our partners, our board and the wider community over the coming months.
Why transport needs a goal, and why this is the room for it
Strip away the workshop mechanics and the case is straightforward. Transport is the only part of the sustainable development picture with no goal to call its own. There is no standalone SDG for it, even though efficient, affordable, safe and resilient transport underpins nearly every other goal, from health and education to trade, food security and liveable cities. The sector carries 7% of global GDP and employs close to 200 million people, yet it still runs on fossil fuels for 95.4% of its energy, a share that has barely moved in fifty years. It is the second largest and fastest growing source of emissions, and among the most exposed of any sector to the flooding and heat a warming climate brings. Meanwhile governments spend roughly 7 trillion dollars a year sustaining fossil fuels, close to three times what the transition itself would cost. The money exists; it is simply pointed in the wrong direction, and the constraint is political rather than financial.
There is a structural problem underneath all of this. Transport is one system, but it is governed as if it were two. Climate commitments sit on one side, the SDGs and the wider development agenda on the other, and transport gets split between them, its emissions targets rarely in conversation with its access and development ones. Real, scaled-up progress depends on bringing those halves back together. It is also why the UN Decade of Sustainable Transport, which runs from 2026 to 2035, needs a goal and measurable targets to hold it to account. A decade is a mandate, not a metric. Without something concrete to deliver and report against, the risk is ten years of good intentions and little to show for them.
That is what a global goal is for. Not a fresh demand on already stretched governments, but a single, legible direction that gathers a fragmented set of asks into one package: expand inclusive access to low-carbon transport, cut the sector’s overall energy use, and phase out fossil fuels by scaling up renewable and zero-emission energy. “Triple access, halve emissions” is the shorthand for exactly that. It gives ministers, cities and funders a north star to organise around, and it gives the many organisations already working on pieces of the problem a common frame to point their efforts towards, rather than competing modal asks that governments struggle to act on. It also gives coalitions of the willing something concrete to deliver against. The eleven countries behind the COP30 transport declaration are the model here: a self-selecting group that turned a shared target into commitments they will report on, open for others to join as momentum grows. A goal and targets give many more such coalitions a reason to form.
The High-Level Political Forum is one of the natural rooms for that conversation to begin. It is where governments come to be measured against the goals they committed to, and where the distance between ambition and delivery is laid bare each year. Transport’s absence from that architecture is not a reason to stay quiet in the room; it is the reason to shout even louder. The forum also sits alongside the two other homes for this work: the COP climate process, where the declaration launched at COP30 to cut transport energy demand by 2035 already gives us an anchor to build on rather than reinvent, and the UN Decade of Sustainable Transport, which runs from 2026 to 2035 and gives the goal a decade-long runway to take shape.
This is the beginning of the consultation, not the launch of a finished position. Transport has spent a decade as everyone else’s enabler and no one’s goal. In New York, with the SDGs under review and the UN Decade just beginning, that finally started to change.
