Dear colleagues,

While our initial announcement was for a four day event, the level of feedback from our partners was such that we've expanded ADB's Asia and the Pacific Transport Forum to run for five days from 24 to 28 August 2020.

We are also pleased to share the draft agenda. While still under development, this agenda reflects the topics of note we would like to focus on including: upstream planning for resilience against future crises, road safety and road asset management, the application of futures thinking and foresight research in our work on transport, sessions on ports and aviation, intelligent transport systems and big data, among others.

Of course, we expect the pandemic to loom large over any discussions.

The majority of countries may be out of the strictest lockdowns and attempting recovery but recent examples show how precarious this situation is. Yet, as we all know, the critical issues of our sector did not disappear in the face of the pandemic, but their importance was simply overwhelmed by the immediate threat. We are starting to see them resurface, especially in the case of public transport and mobility.

We hope is that this virtual forum will give the Asia-Pacific its first major event to discuss the future of transport in a changed world.