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
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
Mobility for All: Getting the Right Urban Indicator
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11)Most urban transport projects have focused on improving the ability of citizens to move freely and swiftly about the city. Typically, that ability has been measured by the share of the population living within, say, 0.5 kilometer of a transit stop, or the maximum travel distance per unit of time, or the amount of transportation infrastructure in a city. Using such ‘proximity’ measures to monitor urban mobility has led to congested highway networks and public transit systems that have failed to bring jobs and services within the practical reach of residents, especially the poor. These proximity-based measures represent indirect attempts to capture the real objective of transit systems: the accessibility of opportunities. New technologies and richer databases now make accessibility, the number of jobs, health facilities, schools, and other essential services that are available without a car in, say, 30–75 minutes, a practical criterion for judging the state of mobility and for designing ways to improve it. Using the accessibility criterion will be critical to achieving SDG 11, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.’ -
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. -
Publication
Advance Funding for Infrastructure PPPs: Cautions from Two Road Projects in Peru
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)Public private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure projects require substantial initial funding that private operators in developing countries can rarely obtain in the domestic market. In 2005, in the context of two important road projects, the government of Peru introduced a financial innovation with two goals: improve the access of the projects’ concessionaires to the international financial markets and book government support as an operating expense rather than debt. The innovations offered distinct advantages to the concessionaires while imposing a significant burden on the government, which has since stopped using them. Nonetheless, the new approach can still be useful in carefully limited instances to help solve the funding problem. -
Publication
Key Pathways to High-Speed Internet in the Middle East and North Africa: Spurring Competition and Building New Networks
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)Most countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are falling behind in their quest to develop high-speed Internet for rapid socioeconomic development. Despite young adults’ rising use of social networking tools and solid progress in a few countries, most of the region’s Internet remains hobbled by monopolized, inadequate infrastructure; weak investment incentives; and high costs. High-speed (broadband) Internet can drive economic and social transformations. To realize that potential, a recent World Bank study finds that MENA countries must pursue a three-pronged approach: reduce costs by fully liberalizing access to the existing Internet infrastructure; support the resulting competition with independent national regulators working within a harmonized regional framework of regulation; and promote investments in new fiber-optic networks and other ultrafast broadband infrastructure (including Long-Term Evolution or LTE) alongside existing technologies. With these measures, plus aggressive strategies for sharing public works infrastructure and subsidies for rural access, MENA can leapfrog its current information and communication bottlenecks. -
Publication
Private Participation in Urban Rail: A Resurgence of Public-Private Partnerships
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-03)Cities in the developing world are relying more on public-private partnerships (PPPs) to carry out the most complex and demanding of public works initiatives - the development of new urban heavy rail, or metros, usually involving underground lines. Most of the world’s metro systems are operated and were funded and built by public agencies. But developing country governments are shying away from the high cost and complexity of such systems and are acquiring more experience partnering with the private sector on infrastructure projects. Hence, the PPP approach, tried for metros with mixed results in the 1990s, has become more attractive. In the past five years, 2010-2014, five cities in Latin America and developing Asia have initiated seven new urban heavy rail lines using PPPs. In four of these projects, the PPPs are fully bundled, that is, they encompass design, financing, construction, and operations. It is too early to judge the overall performance of these seven projects, but some recommendations can be drawn from them as well as from earlier urban rail PPPs. The central lessons are the critical importance of a robust planning and management capacity in the public sector partner and the value of strong efficiency incentives for the private sector partners.