I Introduction

Transport and mobility are essential preconditions for economic growth, social development and global trade. However, they are also often associated with significant environmental impacts, including local air pollution and pollution of the atmosphere, and they thus pose major challenges for the achievement of sustainable development. Transport policies as they relate to sustainable development have periodically been discussed at the United Nations. Transport is dealt with in Chapter 7, ‘Promoting sustainable human settlements development’, and Chapter 9, ‘Protection of the atmosphere’, of Agenda 21 adopted at the Earth Summit in 2012, and in Chapter 3, ‘Changing unsustainable patterns of consumption and production’ of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (‘JPoI’). Sustainable development requires a comprehensive and integrated approach to policy- and decision-making with a view to developing adequate and efficient, economically viable, socially acceptable and environmentally sound transport systems, as envisaged in decision 9/3 adopted by the Commission on Sustainable Development at its ninth session in 2001 and reiterated by the World Summit on Sustainable Development (‘WSSD’) in 2002.

The Commission on Sustainable Development more intensively discussed transport policies and sustainable development at its more recent eighteenth and nineteenth sessions held at UN Headquarters in New York in May 2010 and May 2011. The high-level United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (‘UNCSD 2012’), also known as Rio+20, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 20-22 June 2012, also re-emphasised the need for action at local, national, regional and global levels to make transport systems more sustainable.