Connections
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Connections is a weekly series of knowledge notes from the World Bank Group’s Transport & Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Global Practice. It covers projects, experiences, and front-line developments.
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Publication
Russia’s Ambitious Broadband Goal: Is the Progress Sustainable?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03)In 2012, the Russian Federation announced one of the world’s more ambitious broadband Internet development goals: providing 80 percent of Russian households with ultrafast connection speeds - at least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) by 2018.1 That goal exceeds the current targets in Germany and the European Union, and it is about equivalent to those currently being pursued by countries with ambitious strategic broadband connectivity goals, including Denmark, Sweden, and the United States. As part of the effort to reach its 2018 target, the Russian government recently tasked Rostelecom - a largely state-owned enterprise and the dominant firm in Russia’s broadband market - with the responsibility of connecting 4 million people (about 2.8 percent of all households) in small, widely scattered settlements throughout Russia by installing 200,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cable providing speeds of at least 10 Mbps. The assignment is both a great opportunity and a huge challenge for Rostelecom and for the entire Russian broadband sector. What can Russia do to ensure Rostelecom’s successful completion of its specific task as well as the success of the broader 2018 target? -
Publication
ICT at COP21: Enormous Potential to Mitigate Emissions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)The transformational potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) was on display in Paris at the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. ICTs, including the Internet, mobile phones, geographic information systems (GIS), satellite imaging, remote sensing, and data analytics, could reduce yearly global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) 20 percent by 2030, thus holding them at their 2015 level. Moreover, ICT emissions are expected to decrease to 1.97 percent of the global total by 2030, from 2.3 percent in 2020, while emission reductions attributable to ICT will be nearly 10 times greater than those of the ICT sector. ICTs are also critical for climate change adaptation, providing vital tools for all phases of the disaster risk management cycle. Although the opportunities for ICTs to support the climate change agenda are enormous, much work remains in order to realize them. Governments of developing countries must be further encouraged to include ICTs in their national climate change policies. And the international development community will have to make significant efforts, particularly in low-income countries, to develop ICT infrastructure as well as the institutional capacities and skills to implement and sustain these solutions. -
Publication
Transport at COP21: Part of the Climate Change Solution
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)The case for climate action has never been stronger. Around the world, climate change is putting at risk the lives of millions of people as well as threatening many coastal cities and endangering trillion of dollars of investments in transport infrastructure and services. The Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will bring heads of state and ministers to Paris at the end of November to reach a global climate agreement with far-reaching implications for low-carbon and climate-resilient growth. Transport is playing a greater role in COP21 than in past UNFCCC conferences as a critical part of the solution: a sector that can contribute to both reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and building economy wide resilience to the impacts of climate change. In view of the sector’s potential, the heavily debated transport question is how to sustainably meet the rising global demand for greater interconnectedness and mobility. The World Bank and the seven other leading multilateral development banks have joined forces with the Paris Process for Mobility and Climate (PPMC) and the rest of the transport community to call for more action on transport and climate change. -
Publication
A New Measure of Rural Access to Transport: Using GIS Data to Inform Decisions and Attainment of the SDGs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)In rural areas of the developing world, where the majority of the poor live, good transport connectivity through road infrastructure and transport services is an essential part of the enabling environment for sustainable growth. A lack of detailed nationwide data has limited previous efforts to develop measures of access to roads in rural areas that would guide policy and investment. The World Bank, with support from DFID, has been piloting a methodology that exploits advances in digital technology to assess population distribution and infrastructure location and quality. The resulting Rural Access Index (RAI) may serve as a useful and cost effective tool for governments planning their rural transport programs and as an indicator of progress towards the achievement of several of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets. -
Publication
Creating Pro-Poor Transport: Connecting the Dots - Transport, Growth, and Poverty Reduction
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Transport plays a crucial role in connecting people to goods and services and fostering sustainable development. The literature links improved transport infrastructure to economic growth and poverty reduction through five key mechanisms: (1) reducing transport and production costs, (2) creating jobs, (3) expanding productive capacity, (4) improving access to markets and basic services like health and education, and (5) reducing prices of final goods and services. These benefits depend on supportive conditions in other sectors, such as access to credit, functioning land markets, low trade barriers, and so on. Therefore, any assessment of potential gains from transport infrastructure and services should also account for the interaction with complementary markets. However, the analysis of such interactions, assessing how and when transport infrastructure can help reduce poverty and income inequality, is largely missing from the literature, leaving significant knowledge gaps across the spectrum of transportation settings. This note highlights existing findings and some limitations in the literature on three basic types of transport infrastructure: large projects such as regional or national highways and railroads; rural transport; and transport in urban areas. -
Publication
Lima Urban Transport: On the Way to Transformation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)The implementation of metro line 2, now under way, will provide a modern, 35 kilometer mass transit axis linking major population and job centers in Lima, the capital of Peru, with Callao to the west, the country’s chief seaport and international airport. Integrated with the Lima-Callao region’s existing public transport network, line 2 will create a major corridor that will improve the accessibility of jobs, services, and markets for 2.3 million people and provide a backbone for more efficient urban development. Beyond the investment loan, this co-financed project is an outgrowth of a long term metropolitan transport strategy and multifaceted engagement that is aligned with the World Bank’s goals of reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity through sustainable development. It will give a boost to the competitiveness of the entire Lima-Callao Metropolitan Region, which has a population of more than 9 million and constitutes more than one-third of the national economy. -
Publication
Envisioning the Transport We Need: Goals of the UN High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport
( 2015-09)The world faces two urgent challenges: eradicating poverty through economic development, and tackling climate change. Sustainable transport is crucial to both. In August 2014, the UN Secretary-General established a High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport to make policy recommendations that ‘promote accelerated implementation of sustainable transport.’ The World Bank is a member of the technical working group supporting the advisory group, which sees sustainable transport as a prerequisite for all countries to attain competitiveness, inclusive and equitable growth, balanced social and spatial development, and energy and food security. And it is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in support of the 2°C Scenario. Progress can be accelerated if all heed the calls for action on sustainable transport and development that exist today in a wide range of international agreements, conventions, and declarations. -
Publication
Impact Evaluation to Inform and Transform Investments in Transport and ICT
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-06)A new World Bank initiative, ‘Impact Evaluation (IE) - connect for impact,’ aims to radically transform and better inform the way that transport and information and communications technology (ICT) projects are designed and implemented. Although multilateral lending to this key strategic sector comprises 29 percent of all global assistance, only 0.4 percent of impact evaluations have had transport as a subject. This initiative aims to fill the gap and bring high quality and valuable feedback to projects, improving design, enabling mid-course corrections, and informing ex-post evaluations. For the first time, this initiative will offer a systematic sector approach to generating concrete evidence of what works, what does not, where, when and why. It will greatly increase the impact and value add of investments in transport and ICT projects, which is especially important given global trends toward increasing urbanization, with 70 percent of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050. -
Publication
More Climate Finance for Sustainable Transport
( 2015-05)Actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to stabilize warming at 2 degree Celsius, as agreed by the international community in 2009, will fall short if they do not include the transport sector. Transport is responsible for around 23 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and emissions are expected to rise without further action to curb emission growth and invest in low carbon transport modes. Investment needs are estimated at around $3 trillion to increase the sustainability of existing and new transport systems and to mitigate climate change over the 2015-35 periods. This is in addition to existing annual investments estimated at $1-2 trillion. The actions taken today to send the right policy signals, and establish the enabling institutions and regulations to attract the necessary private finance will be critical to support this transformation. Significant investment opportunities exist in public transport systems, vehicle efficiency improvement, and reducing the need for travel through demand management, regional development policies, and land use planning. As the international community embarks on the road towards CoP 21 in Paris, there is a case to be made for more climate finance flowing towards transport. -
Publication
Reducing Greenhouse Gases: GHG Analysis in Transport
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)World Bank is applying to transport initiatives a new and distinctive method of greenhouse gas (GHG) analysis as part of its comprehensive GHG accounting policy. In transport, choices by travelers determine usage, and a fundamental trend in much of the world is strongly boosting GHG emissions: the massive rise in motorization as household incomes and technical advances make it affordable. This tendency will push transport fuel emissions much higher unless projects sharply expand the opportunities and incentives for users to adopt low-emission modes. The World Bank’s GHG analysis for transport shows whether a given transport project can help lower the trajectory of the sector’s GHG emissions. A central feature is an estimate of the wider social costs of emissions under various modes, for example, air pollution and accidents, as well as climate change. Including them greatly increases the demonstrated benefit of emissions reducing projects and thus will also help accelerate the move to a sustainable transport sector.