Achieving the UN development goals: The role of road transport

At their meeting in New York yesterday, UN and IRU leadership explored collaboration to advance the role of road transport in realising the Sustainable Development Goals.

IRU Secretary General Umberto de Pretto highlighted road transport's crucial role in society, as the lifeblood of economies and communities worldwide, as well as in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals and other sustainability objectives, in a meeting with Junhua Li, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.

IRU proposed that the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Expert Group Meeting on Sustainable Transport should become an annual event to share experiences, best practices, successes and failures for the Decade of Action for Sustainable Transport.

To monitor progress, IRU recommended using the number of ratified and implemented UN Conventions, such as TIR, CMR and ADR, as key indicators.

Umberto de Pretto and Junhua Li also weighed other efforts to boost the sustainability of vital road transport operations. They agreed that strong political will, enabling conditions and tailored regional and local approaches are needed to meet decarbonisation objectives.

The IRU Green Compact, a collective global roadmap to achieve carbon neutrality in commercial road transport by 2050, has found that pragmatic efficiency measures - like longer vehicles, improved route optimisation and driver training - are key to decarbonisation efforts, as important as alternative fuels over the short and long term.

As part of this roadmap, UN trade tools such as the TIR system have a pivotal role in reducing carbon emissions by increasing efficiency. In this case, this means securely speeding trucks across borders, rather than having them idle for hours, sometimes days, on end. The TIR system is the UN's longest public-private partnership.

Junhua Li stressed that both hard infrastructure and soft procedures, services and tools are needed to foster a more sustainable road transport sector. He further added that soft solutions should be accompanied by capacity-building efforts and training programmes, such as those provided by the IRU Academy.

IRU looks forward to continuing working with the UN and its Department of Economic and Social Affairs as we move towards the Decade of Action for Sustainable Transport.

In 2023, IRU was pivotal in getting the UN General Assembly to adopt two resolutions: the UN World Sustainable Transport Day and the Decade of Action for Sustainable Transport.

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