The initiative "Bridging the Gap: Pathways for Transport in a Post 2012 process" (www.transport2012.org) is comprised of GTZ, TRL, Veolia Transport and UITP. The initiative was formed at COP14 in Poznan to encourage international recognition that land transport should play a more important role addressing climate change in the post 2012 agreement and to bridge the gap between this sector and climate policy.
The recent United Nations conference on climate change that took place in Copenhagen in December 2009, was the 15th meeting of the parties under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) - COP 15 - was attended by over 40,000 stakeholders. More than 100 Heads of State and some 190 governments from around the globe made it the largest gathering of climate experts and policy makers ever known. The Conference was expected to deliver an international agreement on a post 2012 international climate regime, after two years of intense high level negotiations and discussions on the basis of the Bali Roadmap. As we now know, it did not.
Even though no substantial and legally binding treaty was agreed in Copenhagen the initiative can be considered to have quite effectively increased awareness of the need for transport and climate change policy to become more integrated in the year leading up to Copenhagen.This was achieved in three ways:
- The initiative formulated 10 guiding principles and key messages for how to integrate transport and climate policy. Based on this, it proposed concrete legal text that could be adopted by negotiators in their negotiating documents. This was picked up in some of the versions of the negotiating text (although all mention of any sector was dropped in the final document).
- The partners have hosted four official UNFCCC side events, three expert workshops, and three events in parallel to the negotiations attended by a wide range of transport and climate change experts.
- Contacts with negotiators from both developed and developing country Parties were established leading to some in-depth discussions with some countries.. An increasing interest and their attendance at the initiative's events from both Annex 1 and non Annex 1 countries is considered to be a good indicator of this.
The value of the work of the initiative is reinforced by the positive feedback from workshops, a large number of subscribers to our newsletter and the large amount of traffic to our website (www.transport2012.org) as well as the numerous visitors at the stand in Barcelona and Copenhagen.
