Ministerial Event

Financing transport infrastructure remains a key challenge for authorities. Increasingly many governments seek private sources of finance to realise their infrastructure needs. “Financing” infrastructure, is about who borrows the money for the project, whereas “funding” is about who repays what was borrowed. There can be no financing without funding. Calling on users of the infrastructure or taxpayers to pay more, however, is often politically challenging. Hence how to spend available money more efficiently remains a major question and the context in which private finance should be considered.

Connectivity is a 21st century mega-trend that is reshaping the world far beyond the transport sector. Integrating transport planning with other policy areas is challenging. Yet transport is becoming more and more interdependent with electricity infrastructure as it decarbonises. The rise of connected vehicles and infrastructure increasingly intertwine it with telecommunications. And an integrated approach for transport, housing and commercial development is becoming critical to reduce congestion, improve access and foster sustainability. With regard to funding transport infrastructure, road transport in particular has much to learn from the energy and telecommunications sectors, which have advanced much further in managing demand by charging users.

Unprecedented innovation in passenger mobility transport services over the last decade has drastically changed around the world. Traditional centralised transport service provision, based around collective public transport services and taxis has been supplemented or replaced by new forms of services based on cheap and widely available telecommunications that provide decentralised and more personalised services to clients.

The 24th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Katowice, Poland delivered the Katowice Rulebook, implementing the Paris Agreement. This important moment marks the beginning of a process where countries need to start stepping up actions for climate protection and to define a clear policy pathway, especially for transport, where it remains one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise.