Here is a summary of the final day's highlights

•    Cleo Kawawaki gave a keynote presentation on enabling quality transport infrastructure investments noting that COVID had constrained government investment greatly, but that ensuring quality infrastructure investments was will stimulate economic recovery. She stated that supporting quality infrastructure investments  requires a shift to a programmatic approach, or to work at a scale that can have a meaningful impact for achieving the SDGs. Private companies are indeed attracted to projects that align with the SDGs, and quality infrastructure will consider the benefits of the investments to the country over the lifecycle of the infrastructure. ADB wants to improve private sector participation through building an enabling environment, ensuring value for money through well-structured projects, and improved monitoring among other actions. She concluded by noting that delivering quality infrastructure requires appropriate regulatory framework, good governance, innovative approaches to mobilizing financing, and strengthening capacity of countries.

Closing Session

The closing session once again brought together a high level panel of leaders and experts to discuss major steps towards the attainment of sustainable transport targets and goals by 2030.

Jamie Leather gave a final overview of how ADB sees its work in transport evolving out to 2030, confirming the region's significant infrastructure deficit but also noting that the region is considered as only having a low level of vehicle ownership. He  stated that in this way, parts of the sector are still in their "infancy" stage, and could be influenced, namely through impacts at scale, decarbonization across all modes of transport, expanded digitalization and use of data among operators and end-users, and by the mobilization of private sector finance. ADB's work in the sector will be focused on improving access, using differentiated approaches to respond to different stages and conditions related to infrastructure needs, support the modernization of infrastructure while also ensuring that operation and maintenance of assets gives them a long life cycle. ADB will also work to bring in the private sector, and not just their financing but also their expertise and skills into transport system operations. Decarbonization will not be forgotten, with a push to reduce transport's negative externalities, advocating for low carbon technologies, and using a nature based approach as well as planning for disaster risk management.

Panelists gave their input on two topics: their ideas on how to undertake the process of decarbonizing by 2030 and specific solutions towards this goal.

•    Hideaki Iwasaki spoke on decarbonizing roads, noting that there is opportunity through policy dialogues and utilizing ADB's strong links with road agencies and transport ministries to get them seriously thinking about decarbonizing their vehicle fleets while simultaneously strengthening greener modes of transport. Improving roads which led to better travel efficiency was brought up as a good intervention. He stated that in Central and West Asia, there had been long programs of road upgrades, for higher category roads which are considered major corridors, but the next challenge was to upgrade second tier roads. But he noted that ADB has experience in this matter, especially in South Asia based programs which upgraded rural roads to improve connectivity.

•    Lise Breuil stated that decarbonization would require the development of a another pattern of mobility that moves away from individual systems of mobility and to mass transit. Speaking on behalf of AFD, she stated that the organization needs to align its own funding (AFD) with decarbonization of the sector, and that while they have funded a number of sustainable transport infrastructure projects, they have to start pushing for policy changes and the deveolpment of a systemic approach of urban mobility in order to create an enabling governance system that has an integrated view of mobility. She noted the difficulty of this as transport involves many entities but that big, costly infrastructure would be needed to deliver low-carbon impacts, and cited the example of the Hanoi Metro project done with ADB as a large, integrated project with transformative effects as it integrated many supporting aspects into its development.

•    Mohamed Mezghani stated his disagreement with the equating sustainability with decarbonization. He spoke on the three dimensions of sustainability: social, economic, environmental and warned that there was too much focus on the environmental which missed out on an integrated approach to sustainability. He related this to the decarbonization of transport, explaining that an integrated approach would help investment in public transport as it was economically, often a huge employer of local jobs, and central to urban living, and by definition offered an accessible mode of transport. He noted that many nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement did not mention public transport. But he also noted that mass transit could not be the only solution, and brought up increased digitilization as a way to create new door-to-door transit options through on-demand mobility services which had grown in popularity since the start of the pandemic.

•    Benedict Eijbergen began by asking participants to recognize that the fundamental shift in transport is already happening, and that the concept of net zero had been adopted and accepted very quickly. But he also spoken on the need to reflect that phasing out of fossil fuel based passenger and freight vehicles was an even greater challenge than the energy sector's phasing out of coal, requiring a profound change in demand, behavior and perception across society and not just among power plant operators. He also warned of "green traffic jams" of EVs, noting that this meant that there was no silver bullet of decarbonization, only a careful and holistic approach that operations on the basis of avoid-shift-improve and a reshaping of the supply and demand sides of transport. Speaking on behalf of the World Bank, he stated that they would strive do do more to engage with their clients on fuel economy, emissions standards, and the shift to clean fuels, while the transport sector at large would need to better establish a strong value proposition for the race to zero.

•    Sujata Gupta stated that transport systems can no longer be looked at in isolation, and in fact needed to be treated as integrated with all sectors - especially with energy. She noted that there is a concept of energy use on a ladder based on income, and transport has something similar with progressive use of vehicles as income increases. To counteract private vehicle ownership, public transport needs to become more enticing and also part of an integrated system that improves quality of life. She noted that ADB's projects had to have demonstrative impact for their beneficiaries and used the example of a project in the PRC which used human-centered design and consultations with commuters in the design of public transport facilities to great effect. Other options were behavior change campaigns that encouraged the use of public transport to address the "social block."

•    Finally, Sungsup Ra gave the closing remarks for the forum, reiterating the opportunities for synergy in pursuing global development goals like the SDGs and the Paris Agreement while also working to build back better in the pandemic era. He specifically noted the opportunities for impacts at scale through programmatic interventions, and stressed that these large scale transformative projects required not only financing, but also needed to be built upon broad based partnerships within and across the transport sector and the application of expert knowledge in order to be both successful and impactful. He stated that the Asia and the Pacific Transport Forum itself was a prime example of partnerships and knowledge coming together, and one that ADB was committed to continue supporting.