GO TO: SPEAKERS
Co-hosted by the World Bank and the World Resources Institute, Transforming Transportation has become one of the largest global conferences dedicated specifically to transport and sustainable development.
Our main theme this year was “Mobilizing Finance for Climate Action”—an urgent priority across the transport sector, which accounts for a growing share of worldwide emissions and is also particularly vulnerable to disaster risk. Despite the clear case for climate-smart mobility, transitioning toward greener and more resilient transport has required unprecedented amounts of investment. This presented a formidable challenge, particularly for low- and middle-income countries.
Leaders and innovators from around the world took the Transforming Transportation stage to discuss how we could overcome these obstacles, attract more investment for sustainable mobility, and harness the full development potential of transport. For this 21st edition of the conference, participants experienced lots of fresh thinking, thought-provoking debates, and innovative ideas. Thank you for being a part of the conversation!
To learn more about the conference, visit the official website.
Join the conversation on social media #TTDC24.
MARCH 19, 2024 - DAY ONE
Welcome Address | WATCH THE REPLAY
Fireside Chat | WATCH THE REPLAY
Plenary 1: Scaling Finance for Low-carbon Transport | WATCH THE REPLAY
MARCH 20, 2024 - DAY TWO
Conversations with policymakers | WATCH THE REPLAY
Opening Keynotes | WATCH THE REPLAY
Plenary 4: Resilient Transport in Challenging Times | WATCH THE REPLAY
To join more sessions, in person or online, register here.
[Femi Oke] Hello, transport professionals and leaders. Leaders of transport professionals. This Is Transforming Transportation, the 21st edition and the second one that is fully hybrid. So, if you're online, I know you've already done this, say hello to your fellow online attendees and your moderator, who'll be making sure that you are part of the discussions and the conversation. If you're in the room in the Preston Auditorium, you literally say hello to the nearest people to you. I will wait. [Laughs] [Femi Oke] That didn't take long. Very efficient. I appreciate that. Our conversations today will be had in this room using that microphone right there in the center of the room, towards the front, but in the aisle. Get used to it. Do not feel shy about standing behind that microphone when you have something to say, because that is how I know that you are also part of the conversation. #TTDC24 for our global audience who are joining us online is the way that you too can be part of the conversation. Our opening segments on day one and day two will be on World Bank Live. So, we could not be here without two very special sponsors. Our lead sponsor is FedEx. Break into organic applause. [Applause] Our development partner, the FIA foundation. More organic applause. [Applause] You may notice there is not a program insight, almost no paper in here, because we are sustainable, but wherever you see that QR scan, that's close to any of our Transforming Transportation branding that will take you to our online agenda. If you've already got the app on your phone, congratulations, you're a pioneer. And you will know then, who will be doing the opening address. Transforming Transportation is brought to you by the World Bank and the World Resources Institute. So your opening remarks will be delivered by Guangzhe Chen, Vice President of Infrastructure for the World Bank, and also Ani Dasgupta, President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Resources Institute. In that order. Welcome, gentlemen, to do the welcomes. Thank you.
[Guangzhe Chen] Thank you, Femi, and good morning. Welcome to Transforming Transportation 2024, the 21st edition of this forum. Ani and I were just chatting. When we started some 21 years ago, we didn't expect this will last 21 years, but it was a fairly moderate transport symposium at that time and is really becoming an international forum by the participation and also the high level of attention. You might also notice that during the COVID in the past, this forum was connected in January with TRB because we thought, at that time, bringing people to come to Washington delinking with TRB, we may not get the attendance. Well, since COVID actually gave us a reason to actually think about planning this separate from TRB, but it turned out that we still have a really good attendance and also great participation. So, thank you to all of you for joining. We find ourselves in a pivotal moment where the decision we make today will have a lasting impact on environment and for generations to come. The urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emission, especially within the transport sector, call for a broad innovation, transformative policies and on voting actions. In this context is paramount that we also underscore the urgent need for financing sustainable solutions. We all know, working in this sector, the tremendous gap obstacle in the sector, particularly in the developing world. As of today, we still have 1 billion people that live more than 2 km away from all the way the road and one in six women globally do not look for jobs out of fear of harassments in public transportation systems. World crashes still claim 1.35 million people in the world and 90% of that is in developing countries. Now, solving these challenges is possible, but it will require unprecedented investments and financings. While I'm talking about financing here, because that's the theme of TT 2024, of course I'm not saying that this is the only solution. We always say financing has to be supported with some policy, regulation, knowledge, partnership and all those. But that being said, the theme of the TT 2024 is about mobilizing finance for climate actions. Country by countries and city by cities, the World Bank's approximately $40 billion of transport portfolio investments throughout the world is contributing to these engagements and really for aiming for in a new mission for the more livable planet. Just a couple of milestones in 2023, the year we just completed, we have a number of achievements through the World Bank engagements. In Quito, Ecuador, a new, brand-new metro is providing a clean, efficient mobility for over 400 passengers a day, and we are proud to be a partner in that engagement. In Dhaka, Senegal, we're also launching Africa's first ever all electric bus rapid transit system, for which the World Bank Group, I want to emphasize, was engaged in these ventures. In the South Pacific. We also work with six small island countries for major road upgrading port and airport infrastructure in those small islands, and then in the global facility for decarbonizing transport we're also very happy to welcome Spain as our new partner and energize this work to reduce transport emission in low- and middle-income countries. Despite all these efforts, the financing need for sustainable transport is beyond what government and MDBs altogether can provide. We must mobilize capital at a greater scale, and that's at the core of the World Bank's evolution roadmap. Private sector investments are necessary to truly meet the outsized need, but also to bring solutions, innovations to the challenge we face. The World Bank's evolution roadmap has been under discussion and the various initiatives has really calling for one of the focus is on mobilizing private financings, especially in a way to leverage using our financing to provide a catalytic role to leverage more commercial and private financing in all development space. To illustrate how this works in practice, consider the new bus rapid transit system in Dhaka, Senegal. As I said, this is the first all-electric bus system in the African continent, but I think what's most interesting and for us most important way of looking at this engagement is how we can all work together. This program brings together various partners from within the World Bank, from the World Bank but also IFC and MIGA. But we also partnered with other different partners like European Investment Bank and of course the government, Senegal and private sectors. The World Banks, so IDA provided financing for the infrastructure and then IFC provide advisory service to advise the government on the PPP structure of this infrastructure development. And MIGA also provided a guarantee that mobilized Meridiam, which is a big asset management company, to provide financing for the fleet. So, the impact of this project demonstrates what is possible from a World Bank Group approach. But, of course, we want to recognize that this is just the beginning of the project and the work is still ahead of us. The World Bank is working hard to enable investment like this and just a few weeks ago, President Ajay Banga announced that a unified guarantee platform of the World Bank, combining all the guaranteed instruments from the Bank, IFC and MIGA and providing a one stop shop to really to facilitate this kind of investment moving forward. Another example I was also mentioned is the Quito Metro, which began operating this year. I mentioned already, that's groundbreaking for several reasons, including scale, climate benefit and socioeconomic benefits. This is an investment that includes several MDBs ourselves, but also Interamerican Development Banks. And this is a program that required over 2 billion dollars. So how to mobilize financing is a key factor in this engagement. One of the key partners that we help make Quito Metro a reality is, I mentioned, IDB and I want to personally thank Ms. Ana María Ibáñez, Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge, IDB, who is here with us today, and also the mayor Pabel Muñoz confirmed it. I think he will be connected online, and we are looking forward to continue to partner with you. With all of us here, we can certainly find more ways to help to step up this kind of example that I just mentioned, and I hope the following days, two days will be a really engaging discussion and really fruitful partnership that we can join together. And I'm personally also looking forward to hearing from Crystal Asige, a singer, a songwriter, a champion for disability, right, and for her trailblazing effort in the Kenyan government and senate. And then we'll hear more from her. We have two sessions dedicated to learning from the experience from a diverse set of transport ministers. And again, I think that will be the next session. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, Transforming Transportation would not be what it is today without a great partnership with the WRI and Ross Center. And I'm really happy to see Ani, my partner in this engagement here today. So, let me stop here and pass on to Ani and thank you very much for your participation. [Applause]
[Ani Dasgupta] Wow. Good morning. That's my only task is to welcome you all on behalf of WRI, to TT 24, and to everyone, I think Femi said, everyone who's connected online, warm welcome to this year's Transforming Transportation. As Femi said and Guang said, this is our third decade of doing this together with the World Bank and I just want to say this is only third because only, because of all of you have participated and contributed to make this the premier forum for discussing intersectional transportation, development and climate. So, thank you for being with us. And the funny thing is, actually there are people in the room who were there in the first TT. So, thank you for being with us all this time. I just want to say, it's an absolute pleasure for me to host this jointly and have this event with Guang. And I see José Luis [Irigoyen] here, who was a partner in crime before that. So, you know, sometimes feels like I've never left, but it is great to be back here. And I'm very excited actually, this year that our focus is on finance. I personally strongly believe this will be one of our bigger barriers to cross and that we are doing this with the World Bank and World Bank Group, as Guang correctly pointed out. And this is a great opportunity. I want to share with you that I think last year was a very important year, positively, for our business of transportation. And I think we have a big task in front of us for the next two days. I spent two weeks in Dubai in December for COP. A lot of you I see in this room were there. And I just want to point out that the COP this year happened in the middle of a pretty tricky global environment. It happened in UAE, a big oil producing country. People were already skeptical. “Will they do anything useful?” It was run by the head of ADNOC, their oil company. Again, people were more skeptical. “Would anything good happen there?” It was happening at a time there are two wars going on in the world that seemed no end. We don't see any end. The overall confidence of the world in multilateral processes were at a low. In spite of all these, the outcome of COP actually was more positive than any one of us expected. Anyone with a lot of skeptical people, some of you are right here. All, even the most skeptical people, that actually the COP outcome was more positive than we expected. It wasn't perfect, but it was more positive. The most positive thing, the many positive thing is the 196 countries for the first time actually said “we need to get away systematically from fossil fuel” for the first time. It might seem obvious to all of you, but it's the first time the language was used in that. And it matters actually, and it matters because transport is 23% of that fossil fuel. So, all of us, our responsibility now is to help countries to figure out how do we use the transport mechanism to actually make that commitment to a reality. Two other things happened that are actually very interesting. The world also committed to triple renewable, but double efficiency. Transportation actually has a huge role to play to get to the doubling efficiency goal. And the third thing that happened is that the world, for the first time committed that the cities, or decarbonizing cities is a critical part of decarbonizing the world, that it'll be part of NDCs, for the first time, 130 plus countries actually signed the declaration, but it became part of the ultimate agreement called “UAE Consensus”. I'm just saying this because that these things, we as a community been complaining for a long time that the global processes don't recognize transportation. Correctly so, I think we were complaining correctly, but now there are things in place that actually gives us an opportunity to push this forward. And the last thing I'm going to say is just before COP, United Nations published a report called the “Global Stocktake”, which was the first time there was evaluation after Paris. How are we doing? How is the world doing? Obviously, it said we're not doing very well, but it said two other very important things, that we need to take a systems approach towards outcome. We won't be able to solve this by sector by sector, and talked about how transportation needs to be a systematic approach, not only of decarbonizing, but actually to getting modal shifts, getting public transport, walking, biking and electrification at the same time. These are all things we've been saying for a while, but now 196 countries seem to embrace it. But not only global things are happening. Actually, things on the ground across the world are taking place that are very innovative. You heard from Guang, terrific example just now. I was in India just a week back, two weeks. We have a team there and a lot of, actually, the World Bank colleagues here. I just met with Olivia who works very closely together, India last year, collectively, four cities collectively procure 5000 electric busses that when one procurement reduced the operating cost of electric busses by 60%. This year they're committing to buying 800,000 electric busses. 800,000 busses, not electric, would be a miracle in India. They're 300,000 busses short overall. So this leap frogging of not only providing public transport but electrifying at the same time is the kind of momentum, kind of change we need. So we need to see how this happens everywhere. So this is just one example. These kind of things are happening. So the question is over three decades now, 21st year, one thing we have done here most importantly is build a community of practitioners. All of you, a lot of you know each other, I hope all of you get to know each other by the end of the two days. We actually have a huge opportunity and a task in front of us. And I just want to outline for you my view of what this TT, what success of this TT might look like. The first success would be all of us helping countries actually meet the commitments. They met in Dubai, in Belém, not this year. The next year all the countries will come with a new commitment, new NDCs is called to see how the transportation NDC, which has been really difficult to get to, actually part of the solution, part of the system change the world needs, part of the commitments they've made. Only 92 countries today, actually of 196, actually have anything to do with transport in their commitment. And very few actually, even the 92 are very detailed. So, this is our task to, there are a lot of ministers here in these two days, actually build partnerships with them to see how we can actually get to the outcome they have committed to in a technical, feasible manner. The second is finance. There's only 1.3 trillion dollars in climate finance today if you add up everything, which people estimate and you hear from speakers in the next two days is about five times smaller than it needs to be. It needs to be about nine to 10 trillion dollars by the end of this decade. So the question is how do we get to that finance? How do we get to private capital flowing here? And this is where World Bank Group’s leadership is very important and how do we actually make the system? We need to have many different innovation finance to get blended finance, get innovation in it. You will hear from Frannie Leautier, who's doing phenomenal work in Africa. You'll hear from Vera Songwe, who like me, also used to work in the Bank, about how we can get to a financial outcome that is good for, not the planet, good for people, but good for countries. So, finances would be a critical thing. I'm very happy that we are focusing on that. The third thing, we need to do better, I think that we are very good at doing as a community is learn faster from each other, innovation taking place across the world, that we need to be faster at bringing one innovation from one place to another. And you will hear from Claudia Lopez, I think just in a few minutes. In Bogota, that's 600, I think 630 km. Cycling, 6%, 7%, 8% of population actually cycle to work in a phenomenal change that has happened in Bogota. The question is not only what she did, you will hear, but how did she do it and how can we replicate that in other places? So it's an exciting moment. We have work to do. I hope we have a really successful two days here. I want to thank all of you joining us. I really want to thank all of you that joined online. This has been phenomenal. I think 4000 people have registered for this conference. And as you know, in this room, we can only have about less than 1000 people. So this is innovation. I want to thank the Bank and its technology for making it work. So, thank you for being here. Looking forward to phenomenal two days.
[Femi Oke] So much pressure to be the first conversation of a global gathering for Transforming Transportation. I know just the two people to take on that pressure. Patrick Achi is the former Prime Minister of Cote d'Ivoire. Patrick, please come and take a seat here on the stage. He is now at the Center For International Development, a Senior Fellow at Harvard University, and he will be joining me in that seat just there. Thank you, Patrick. Very good. Either one. Former Prime Minister's choice. Thank you. Claudia Lopez is the former mayor of Bogota. Claudia, welcome. She's now an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, excuse me, at Harvard University. So it is clear that when former leaders die, they go to Harvard University. Heaven, I'm not sure, but great to have you. I would love to know from your position of leadership, we're looking at country perspective, also a city perspective. So, it's nice to hear those two perspectives, but before we start, what story would you tell us to tell us your commitment to transforming transportation? Claudia, one story.
[Claudia Lopez] Well, thank you so much for having us here. It's a great pleasure to be with all this community thinking about Transforming Transportation. So I'm the daughter of a teacher. I'm the oldest of a six siblings family. I grew up in a low middle income neighborhood. And sort of density, proximity and diversity, that's what cities are, that's what they provide. Opportunities for education, for work, for innovation. And the world is divided between cities already made and cities to be built. That's how we are divided. It's not by nations, it's actually by cities that are already made and need improvement, or cities that are still to be made and can be improved. Bogota is the capital of Colombia. It's a large city. It's an 8 million people city in an 11 million metropolitan region. Roughly 40% of the city was self-built by the families. Only half of the city was properly planned previous being inhabited. And I think that's the biggest lesson that Latin America can offer to other regions, such as Africa. Do land use planning in advance, decide location. Thus, we can build progressively, both the private housing, and the public infrastructure, because the money is not going to be there for previously all the money needed. So, the problem is not building progressively. 40% of Bogota was built progressively by families, and the other half of the city was progressively built by the government, both the local and the national government. But land use planning, land acquisition before it is built. The value we created, that's the second message. The value we created by living together, that's the main source of finance to do proper cities. we need to capture that land value increase that we all create by deciding to live together. That's a public, not a private value, and it should be captured either by taxers or by contributions or developers. The third message I will say in my experience, both as a citizen and as mayor, is we have a common, I don't want to use the word enemy, but a common problem to fight against, which is land speculation. Speculators are the ones who take advantage of the fact that we want to live together, that we create value together, and that people need opportunities for income, for jobs mainly, and that's the reason why they come to the city. So, when you do land value planning before, in advance, even if you're going to do that progressively, let's say people are going to come and probably this land is going to be formed, but you are able, as city government, to say, “This is the place in which we're going to build progressively, this neighborhood. This is how we're going to distribute land in advance.” That's the most important, probably contribution that you can make both for the present and the future of the prosperous families in a city. And finally, I will say, in terms of transportation, think about this. At least, I'm sure 25% of your citizens in any city around the world walk. It's a quarter of the daily trips. At least a quarter. We all walk. Nature, walking and biking don't need to be decarbonized. It is already decarbonized, right? It can account easily for a third of the trips. Provides good infrastructure for active mobility. That's the easiest, the cheapest and the most effective thing. The proper forestry, the proper greening of cities, that's the air conditioning of cities, trees, forestry, diverse forestry, properly planned around cities, that's the air conditioning. So, bring together forestry, space for pedestrians, sidewalks and cycling lanes. It costs a penny. With the cost of 1 metro, with the cost of 1 BTRs, you can build thousand kilometers of green pedestrian cycling spaces in your cities. And that's going to change. And finally, we all know for sure that people will use whatever quality infrastructure we built. If you build avenues for fossil fuel cars, people will use avenues for fossil fuel cars. If you build green corridors for pedestrian cycling and decarbonized public transportation, they will use that. Each mode of transportation generates its own demand. So don't waste resources in gray fossil fuel avenues. Invest in green corridors. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] Patrick, I anticipated this conversation because you are a former Prime Minister of Cote d'Ivoire, which means you can go deep, tell us all your dark secrets and feel very comfortable, we will only share it with about 2000 people, but it does give you a sense of release to be able to really talk about successes, challenges, lessons learned for implementing sustainable mobility, sustainable transport. What do you want to dish?
[Patrick Achi] I think at Harvard we say Chatham House rules, except here we are online, I guess. Yeah, it doesn't work here. Thank you very much, first of all for inviting me today and I'm really happy to be at this stage and be able to share with the audience, prestigious audience there, the 20 past years’ experience that I had not only as infrastructure minister, but also as Prime Minister, as you just mentioned. As you first of all talked about country level, my first thought will go to something that the founding father of Cote d'Ivoire said 60 years ago. Road precedes development. Road precedes development. And you could see that in a very remote rural area. If you go there and you ask people between electricity, water supply, road, agriculture, seeds, what do you want? You'll be very surprised. People will tell you road. I happen to be Minister of Economic Infrastructure, started in 2000 and I was hold in charge as infrastructure about water infrastructure. So I'll go to very located remote place in very small villages. And I'll meet women because very often they are the one who are fetching the water, who are making long distance fetching the water. If they don't have clean water, it's really a nightmare for the house. And I'll ask them, out of all the basic needs that you might have in this village, what will be your priority? And she'll say, road. I was really surprised. I said, how come road? You can't even access clean water and you want road? Just meaning that for people being able to go out from the place, they are; either to sell crops, because they have grown crops. If they cannot sell it, they cannot generate revenue either to go or visit people or move is very important to people. So he's invested a lot of resources in infrastructure development, not only road, but also port, airport, to develop the country. And the country has witnessed very fast and important growth for the first 20 years of independence. And then as we move forward, the issue came about how to finance this road. And the World Bank was very active at that time, 30 years back, on the road financing. And they would tell you, I want the traffic before I finance the road. And you say, if you finance the road, I'm going to have the traffic. It was the chicken and the egg issues. So really, road development in the African continent started to really stop as mobilizing resources to be able to finance this road became a real issue because fiscal constraint, limited budget, difficult access to international resources, or private resources to finance road is, I’m pretty sure even today, the biggest nightmare of any government, for political reason, for economic reason, for any reason, as soon as you're elected or within your campaign, the must-ask things by the people is road to be able to access the capital city, the port, the airport or any area, because they feel that's the way they can improve their livelihood. Now it comes to the city, as you mentioned it, 50% of the population, mainly in my country, but also in many countries in Africa, are now living in the city. I guess it's about 80%. We're still lagging a little bit behind, but I guess we're coming there really fast because by 2035, 65% of the population will be living in an urban city. So, developing transport within the urban area is becoming a real nightmare for us because, as you just said, land planification, the cities are growing at such a speed that the country and the government cannot develop the basic infrastructure as fast as people are moving in. So you see a slum being developed here and there and coming after and trying to implement a land development project, a road development project is very, very difficult. We're moving forward and trying to see strategy wise, multimodality actually in Abidjan, having 20% of the population living there, around 5 to 6 million people, we're working on road network, naturally. We have 1.500 busses commuting 1 million people per day. We're working on the metro project, 37 km line. We're working with the World Bank at the BRT project too. We're working on shipyard because we have a Laguna to transport people to the lagoon. And we're working also some private people project on a cable car project. So, all these should give the opportunity of people to lower down the cost of transportation, because at the end of the day, for the people in the city, they do not want to use up all their budget for transport. Today, we are around 30% sometime of the budget going into transport. So how you will do to make transport cost as low as possible with not being in a position like we're doing right now for the city busses to subsidize the ticket? That's a major issue and that brings up once again the issue of financing, because resources are needed for health, for education, for agriculture, for food, for shelter, and yet you need resources to build road and transportation. It puts so much pressure that you're looking for very low, let's say, concessional rate money to be able to finance this infrastructure. In most of the developing world at a community level, you're very lucky, because it's arranged another way, central government is mainly financing the infrastructure of the cities, because the cities are not able to raise enough resources from the infrastructure to be able to finance itself, to raise money by itself. So, the central government is financing the road. So, you develop your road infrastructure or your transport infrastructure, depending on how much resources the central government can allow. And sometimes that doesn't match with your need. So, you have to find a very original way to make transportation as easy as possible for people, and that it comes to management. You have multimodal ability.
[Femi Oke] I like the phrase “find a very original way”. What does that really mean?
[Patrick Achi] That really means that at the end of the day, you have quite an amount of sectors or transporters. You have community busses, you have city busses, you might have metro, you might have, like I say, cable car, you might have all these things. How do you coordinate? You manage people moving from one point to the other point, talking to each of these stakeholders to make it the shortest possible journey and the cheapest one. It's extremely difficult to manage different transport infrastructure and equipment, and at the same time being able also to manage public and private. Some of them are managed by the private sector, other one are managed by the public sector. How do you coordinate all that? Where will be the bus station, the shipyard Laguna station, the metro station? How will they go from the house to the station? All that has to be managed in a way that things are made easier, simpler and cost effective for people.
[Femi Oke] Claudia, you have a thought. Patrick inspired a thought. Share it with Patrick.
[Claudia Lopez] So you made a very crucial question. What is actually the innovation here? What are we talking about? What is innovation at the moment? So, let me give you these figures. 65% of public transportation trips are made by women. 65% of fossil fuel car trips are made by men. Girls and women and elders do more than half of the walking trips in every city. Women in almost every city, particularly in more than half of the planet population in the Global South walk more, work longer, and are paid less. And that's the biggest source of inequity in our cities and in our planet. So, do you want a simple planning trip to do or advice to follow? Plan your cities thinking as a girl, and build your cities moving as a woman. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] Claudia, that will be the simplest and probably most advancing thing to. Why?
[Patrick Achi] I though you would have said thinking like a woman, moving like a man?
[Claudia Lopez] No, that's exactly the wrong thing. If we move like a man, then we move mainly by fossil fuel, private cars. That's unsustainable. That's unfinanceable, that's undesirable. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] The women are clapping. The men are not clapping. [Laughing]
[Claudia Lopez] So you are all promoting change. Men of this world, welcome to change. Because if we move the way you move… [Applause]
[Femi Oke] If you would like to have a debate with Claudia and Patrick, now is your moment. The microphone is right there. Stand behind it, because I'm going to only give you about five or six minutes. You actually want to have this conversation right now. Online? O’Neall is the moderator. Right. O’Neall, do you have anything to share with me right now or are you going to gather the information?
[O’Neall Massamba] We got one question that I can share.
[Femi Oke] Go ahead.
[O’Neall Massamba] And the question is, what do you think is the prevalent critical cause of disconnect between transport practitioners and the public in shaping a sustainable transport according to the peculiar need of its subject population?
[Femi Oke] Was that from somebody from the World Bank? That question sounds highly suspicious.
[Claudia Lopez] I agree.
[Femi Oke] Who sent that question in from the World Bank? I know your questions.
[Claudia Lopez] Let me just add following the question, so I will answer to the question. Really? And this is not a woman thing. This is a simple, rational survival thing, really. We cannot move on private fossil fuel cars, period. Period. That's a simple, obvious thing. So, who moves differently from that? Girls move differently from that. Elders and women. We walk more, we use more public transportation. That's a fact, everywhere. The mode of transportation that we use, the less that we should use more, is biking. And biking is the other way around, at least in Bogota. And I can guess almost everywhere. Two thirds of the biking trips are done by men. So good, man, you're learning. Bike more, bike more. That's good. That's why nature, pedestrian sidewalks or malls and cycling lanes could come together. They are the cheapest, the most efficient, the most sustainable things to move, promote active mobility. And the second thing that I will mention to the question is to my friends of the World Bank, of the IDB, of the Asian Development Banks, we, in the cities, we have the people, we have the innovation, we have the solutions. But guess what? We don't have the money. Because you put us in a very lengthy red tape bureaucratic process after our, sorry, national governments, when we have by far better financial standards than our own national governments. So come on, you have been thinking through this for 20 years. Let's make it happen these years. Set up the conditions for lending money directly to the cities without the red tape of bureaucracies at international banks or governments or national government. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] So I'm going to give you some inside information. Patrick is actually married to a mayor, not this one. And he knows the frustrations of mayors regarding money.
[Patrick Achi] I guess. I just want to say that she was talking about the practitioner and the government or the planning institution and the academics. All the people were thinking about developing urban area or road infrastructure. First of all, I'm sorry, but people do not feel concerned even if I agree with her. If it's fossil fuel, if it's a green road, if it's a green car, if it's a green metro, they just want a ride and the cheapest ride. We are the ones who are concerned about all these issues, decarbonization and all that, but in their daily life, they are not confronted to that. They just want to be able to move around at the cheapest and the fastest way. So, the divide is there. They are not really aware, I mean most of them, the majority of the issue going on, except when for instance, sometime with the climate change, and I was going to that, you will see now in a certain area, even in the capital city, 24 hours, 240 mm rainfall floating all over the places, giving us a hard time with road maintenance, cost, again, giving us a hard time with public transportation management. But at the end of the day, we are the ones who want to reduce, to decarbonize the transport sector. For instance. As far we are concerned, we have limited the age of car importation to five years, more than five years. It doesn't come in the country. Since we're not producing cars, 100% of the cars are imported and people used to import ten years, 15 years, 20 years used cars from Europe or elsewhere. And that was the worst crime you can even imagine, green wise. So, we limited that and we could see the impact. Now, that's where I was coming from and agreeing with her. At the end of the day, once again, we're talking about all this financing coming in green, decarbonized, whatever to change the picture, to change the journey, to change the narrative. All of us want to change a narrative. Me? I want to build walkway, I want to build bike ways on roads that didn't have that before in the city. But our need to displace people, to build them. At the end of the day, we want a dream like you, we want good things for our people. Where do you get the money now? I will answer. I will ask you. It's me who should ask you like her. Central government, local government, both of them are asking you, where is that carbon money you've been talking about for years and years in conference and conference? We just don't say it. I get money from the multilateral agencies, I get money from the private sector. None of them are telling me that it's carbonized. It's decarbonized. I don't know the color of a carbonized or decarbonized money. It's just a money. You have to borrow. You have to pay the interest rate. So if there is a place where I can get free borrowing, free interest borrowing money that is decarbonized, tell it to me. Because at the end of the day, that's the question. We know what to do. We know what we want. We have examples all over the world. We know how our people want. We know what is good for them. Where do we get the money to do it? Am I right? Men and women can, at least on this side agree with each other. [Applause]
[Claudia Lopez] We agree on that. But Patrick, made a very important point here. There is an order. I mean, we all want to save the planet, for sure. We all know the price of liberty and rights and duties and democracies. But we need to make this compatible. And there is only one way to lead, which is to lead by example, not by what we say, it's by what we do. Action is what makes the difference. Not words. And action needs investments, as Patrick says. But it not only needs investments and money to be able to do it, but there is an order. So let me rephrase what I agree of what just Patrick said. You cannot pretend. It's immoral to pretend that the large majority of the population of this planet, which is under hunger and poverty and unemployment and informality and despair, has to, on top of that, save the planet at the expense of its own opportunities, on its own pockets. So, you want to care for the planet, then care first for the people. People need, and we all need to comply the Sustainable Development Goals, which has one goal that we haven't never achieved, which is to stop hunger, to stop war, to stop abuse. Caring for people, offering them freedom and education and jobs and care. That's the right that people want to do, from home to care, from care to education, from education to job to come back to home. Jobs, care, education and jobs. That's the thing transportation needs to connect. That's all. And the more dense, the more proximate, the more closer they are, the better. We all know that. So, care for the people, because only we care for the people first, we will have democracies that can care and compromise globally for the planet. It's not the other way around. As long as I've been alive, I haven't seen… Dictatorships and autocrats don't even care for their own people, even less for the rest of the people in this planet. You need people who can compromise, who can be held accountable. It means to have democratic processes in your societies, but you're not going to have democratic processes in your societies if you keep half of your population of more under hunger and poverty and exclusion. So care for the people, so that we have people and citizens who can care for democracies and democracies that can compromise and act globally to care for the planet. There is an order here that matters.
[Femi Oke] Patrick, finally, you are teaching at Harvard. What is the assignment you would like to give us for the next two days and the year between 2024 TT and 2025 TT? A short, achievable assignment where we can get an A plus.
[Patrick Achi] I mean, the seminars that I'm giving at Harvard have to do, what we were talking about earlier, have to do with unlocking the potential for the African continent to speed up its development. Unlocking the potential. As we all know, I won't come back to that. There's so much potential here and there that need to be used to help the country move forward. The country has been moving quite well these past years. But when you look at what Southeast Asia has been able to do, and Asia in general in the past 50 years, you could see that there is a margin of progression and quite fast progression. But at the end of the day, there are many issues that will go around. Then we come back to the financing, financing the development. And today, most of our countries are confronted with priorities that they have to manage, like she was just saying, health, education, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, so on and so forth. And now you have to add to that security issues and climate issues. Now, the local budget and fiscal room is not enough to take care of all that. Give credit to the leaders. I won't come to the political issue of democracy or not democracy, so on and so forth, but at the end of the day, some people within the government want to improve the livelihood of their population, and yet here they are not having enough resources. You know, the cost of resources outside today, the burden on the debt service is so high that you have to refrain yourself for taking too much money outside. Now, how do you go for that? What do you prioritize? Now the climate is coming on the picture, like she said, agriculture, climate-agriculture, energy, climate-energy, road, transport, infrastructure, climate-infrastructure. Everything comes with that. Now, where is the climate money?
[Femi Oke] Is that the assignment still?
[Patrick Achi] Yeah, that's what I want to say.
[Femi Oke] Where is the climate money? Find it?
[Patrick Achi] I'm pretty sure now there's a new challenge, and I think the World Bank and all these people are very bright with every single challenge they have behind a very good original initiative on the challenge solution, which is the money. The carbon, the climate, the green money that we've been talking from COP to COP, from conference to conference, the government does not really get a good grasp of what it is, where it is, how do we get it, is it cheap, is it free, how much it costs? We don't have it. Yet, we have the challenge to meet. So, by one year from now, when your conference will be done, someone will be on the stage, guest speakers that time from the World Bank, on the panel will be there, sitting there, and I'll be pleased to ask the question. Thank you very much. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] Patrick Achi, Claudia Lopez, you set the bar high for every single conversation we have to have in the next two days. We thank you.
[Claudia Lopez] Thank you.
[Femi Oke] Excellent. It's my mobile. Thank you. You're such a Prime Minister, taking care of business. Our next plenary, in fact, our very first plenary, is Scaling Finance for Low Carbon Transport. Let me invite the panelists onto stage. We're going to take chair number two, three, four and five. Vijay Kumar Saraswat. Welcome. Admassu Tadesse. Good to see you. I feel like he's going to take up residence at the Preston Auditorium. Two, three, four or five. You can take any of those chairs. Paul Bodnar. Paul, fantastic. Great. And Frannie Leautier. Hello, Frannie. Thank you. Please come onto the stage. Thank you very much. Excellent. Very good. Setting the scene for this conversation, our keynote is Ana Maria Ibáñez, Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge at the IADB. Ana, I like your sense of drama walking across the entire stage to get to this podium over here. Welcome. There will be applause to help you walk across the entire stage. Thank you. [Applause]
[Ana Maria Ibáñez Londoño] Good morning to all. I'm really pleased to be here, sharing this panel with colleagues from the World Bank, from the World Resources Institutes, governments and the civil society and the private sector as well. And for me, it's really an honor to give the opening remarks for this panel on how to mobilize finance for climate action and for transportation. It's a very good segue to the conversation between Claudia and Patrick, who were talking precisely about that. I would like to thank the World Bank and the World Resources Institute for the invitation to the IDB to partner in this important event for the transport community in developing countries. As Claudia mentioned, transfer connects us and it connects us to opportunities, it connects us to essential services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the regions that, the most unequal regions in the world, and where 30% of its population lives under the poverty line, public transportation is very important to link families to jobs, health care and education, and this is especially important for the vulnerable population. For example, the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit System in Lima, increased access to jobs by nearly 7%. Remarkably, the cable car system in Medellin increased these opportunities by 100%. A study done by Roman Zarate from the World Bank shows, for example, that access to the metro lines in Mexico City increased formality for formal employment for the vulnerable population. Put simply, transport fuels economic growth, and this growth is very important to overcome poverty and also. to finance the green energy transition that we need to pursue. But, and this is a very big but, transportation takes a toll on the environment. In contrast to other regions where energy is the main source of pollutants, Latin America relies on a relatively clean energy matrix. Instead, 40% of the CO2 emissions in our region comes from transportation, and this number is steady, it’s not dropping. Our study says that if countries do not take bolder actions now in transportation, we will not be able to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement of 2030. This is a little over five years, so there is not much time really to achieve these goals. So, like many other regions, and like Claudia and Patrick were mentioning, Latin America and the Caribbean faces really the dual challenge of growing its economies, providing opportunities for the population, while also coping with the economic and social effects of climate change. And Latin America and the Caribbean is particularly vulnerable to climate change. I would say it's one of the most vulnerable regions to global warming. We have droughts, forest fires, floods and hurricanes that are becoming ever more intense and ever more frequent. For example, when we examine the yearly losses due to storm damages in countries in the Caribbean, this amount to yearly to 3.6% of their GDP, it's sizable. In addition, we see that countries in our regions have really little fiscal space to close the infrastructure gaps of today. What is the infrastructure gap in Latin America and the Caribbean? If we want to meet the SDG goals by 2030, the infrastructure SDG goals, we will need to invest over 3% of our GDP annually in infrastructure. This is about 2.2 trillion dollars annually that we would need to invest. Currently, we are investing 1.8% of our GDP in infrastructure and 0.8% in transport. We are nowhere near these figures. We need to invest much, much more if we want to be efficient, inclusive and have sustainable transport systems that really improve the quality of lives while promoting sustainable growth. And we believe at the IDB that Multilateral Development Banks are part of the solution and should be part of the solution. How can we help countries achieve these goals? First, with the traditional concessional finances for sustainable infrastructure, such as the metro lines, such as BRTs, projects like the one we are cofinancing with the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and CAF across Latin America. But our loans, our grants are really far from being sufficient to meet the goals that I already mentioned. The gaps are very big. So, to do this, and this is a second point I want to make here, we need to mobilize private capital. This is very important. And we need to mobilize private capital for low carbon projects. And we can use green bonds, infrastructure bonds, blended finance mechanisms and PPPs. At the IDB, we provide support for mobilizing this capital and we are stepping up our role to help countries in our region to mobilize it through innovative financial mechanisms. So far, about 30% of the green and sustainable bonds issued by our region were backed by the IDB Group. And also, for every dollar of blended finance, the IDB Group is leveraging between nine to 10 dollars towards climate. Third, and very important as well, the MDBs can help derisk projects so they become more attractive for private investors. This is very important for developing countries. We can do this through various mechanisms such as political risk insurance, credit enhancements and guarantees. Fourth and last and very importantly so, MDBs can really work with governments to implement policies and institutional reforms that support sustainable transportation. Some of those are the removal of subsidies to fossil fuels, but by providing other alternatives for transportation, the adaptation of regulations that reflect the actual environmental and social cost of transportation, and the deployment of training to empower local stakeholders to implement innovative approaches. Our work in electric mobility in the region is one example of what I am already mentioning. We are helping a large number of countries to develop their electric mobility roadmaps through technical assistance. We are putting in place the technical and economic policies to encourage the energy transition. We are assisting national and local governments because, as Claudia mentioned, local governments play a very important role in finding innovative financial mechanisms and we are providing loans for changing infrastructure and bus fleet renewal programs to both public and private sectors. Many of the concepts that I am mentioning are embodied in our new institutional strategy which focuses on reducing poverty and inequality. Very important. Fostering sustainable growth and fighting climate change, and promoting sustainable mobility across the region is really key to achieve these goals. With the capital increase of IDB Invest, the IDB Group will expect to bring 112 billion in additional financing over the next years to the Latin American region. With the replenishment of IDB Lab, we will foster innovation across the region and we will enhance our role as a knowledge bank, which is crucial to provide technical support and knowledge to the governments in the region to go through the energy transition. So, the challenge is large and the financial needs are significant. Governments, private actors, civil society and MDBs working together can rise to the occasion, but we really do need to work together. I celebrate the opportunity to be here of being together at Transforming Transportation 2024 and encourage all of you to take advantage of these days to create synergies, drive innovation and build momentum towards a transportation system that meets the needs of both people and the planet. The actions we take today will drive our future. Thank you very much.
[Femi Oke] Thank you very much for your keynote. I would like you to appreciate how much expertise we have on stage. Frannie, when people say hello to you and you introduce yourself, Ana Maria, are you staying for the panel? You can stay if you want to. Very good. Frannie, when you say hello to people and they say “Frannie, what do you do?” What do you tell them?
[Frannie Leautier] [Speaking Swahili]. Anyone speaks Swahili in the room? I thought, Femi, you fixed this because the World Bank and the World Resources Institute make me feel very welcome with the image that you have chosen for this year's TT. That is a photograph of a very important crossing in Dar es Salaam. And the reason I like it is actually it's a great photo to talk about innovation in finance. Because in that photo you see the past, the present and the future. What is the past? The infrastructure you see, the roads were built using government money and they actually borrowed, including at some point from the World Bank. The barriers you see in the middle, those concrete barriers were put as a safety measure to prevent cars from turning and going into the market that you see in the image. And then, you see their busses, including BRT. So, there's a solution for electric busses right there, but those use natural gas right now. And then you see pedestrian and cargo all in the same image. But what I wanted to point out are three things. You see those parasols, the umbrellas there in blue and yellow? It has a mark called tiGO. That's the largest telco and it's a mobile payment platform, all privately financed, initially by Sweden, who owned Tigo, and then sold it to the first African investor, Axian. So in that is a kernel of a solution for financing, which is what did the World Bank do in telecoms in the 1990s? It phased out of funding telecoms, but it did two very important things. It did the knowledge, research and policy to open up the telecom sector for private investment. It put in a lot of efforts in understanding the value of the knowledge economy, which drove the investments in the sector; and then let the private sector and governments come in and solve the problem and use those resources then to invest in roads and rail and ports and airports. Second point I want to point out, you see the crossing, you have pedestrians and a person in a bicycle, so that's both active mobility, including for cargo, because you see the lady carrying cargo on the head and the gentleman will be putting cargo on the bicycle. So, from that very easily you can go from active mobility to electric mobility because they are coming from quite a distance to be able to walk there. And you know, if you don't have good nutrition, that is quite difficult to do in 40 degrees centigrade and humid. So going from that to electric is quite easy to do. Third, that crossing that you see, the zebra crossing. I thought they named that zebra crossing after East Africa because we have a lot of zebras there. But what is interesting about it, WRI, under the [Ross Center] Prize for Cities, the very first Ross Prize for Cities, which is a price that goes to the most innovative urban solutions, was given to an organization in Dar es Salaam that was actually helping school kids cross safely from one end of the street to the other because before that, there were no such zebra crossings, there were no solutions that allowed kids would have to run to avoid those busses and trucks coming very fast. So solutions for financing three innovations there make the policy environment attractive to the private sector to come in. Leverage philanthropic capital for the right solutions that would allow active mobility to move. Third, ride the wave of the advantage developing countries have, which is they need to solve three things at once. Electricity, transport, and the cargo solutions, including for nutrition, because right there, there is a market. So the agricultural solutions with products coming from rural areas need to be brought to the cities, and you need to solve those. You can do that by financing a package that the government produces the infrastructure. 90% of all infrastructure now is funded by government. That the private sector comes in with solutions for energy and transport. Because you see the electric lines there, they're coming from a hydro station quite far from this place. And when the rains are short during drought, there is no electricity. So, if you want a transport revolution, you need to use the sun, because that will be abundantly available. But then, you have to have somebody to pay for the charging stations or give the monopoly for a few years to a private operator to actually take the risk. And these are things the World Bank can do quite easily, and other MDBs, by offering that platform to do that.
[Femi Oke] Frannie. Yes. I am going to test the attendees on this photograph on the way out. Did you have any idea how much information was in that picture? It's extraordinary. If you don't score 100 as you leave this building, Frannie will have you in detention. So the question I asked Frannie, who is obviously rehearsing to be a politician, was, when people say hello to you, what do you tell them you do? Frannie you are not allowed to answer that now. But Paul, please go ahead, gentlemen. I'm going to go down the line, because I really want people to understand your expertise, because at any time they want to, either online or right there at the microphone, stand at the microphone, and then you're immediately part of this plenary. Okay, Paul, go ahead.
[Paul Bodnar] Sure. I will try to be very direct. So, I work for the Bezos Earth Fund, which is the largest philanthropic commitment ever made to support climate action and protect nature. And I try to harness my experience across government, private finance, and nonprofits to help each of those categories get into a mode where instead of saying, “after you,” they're saying, “follow me”.
[Femi Oke] Great. Admassu.
[Admassu Yilma Tadesse] Good morning. I run a regional financial institution. We are a very interesting outfit in the sense that we combine conventional development finance with pension fund money and other forms of private sector finance. And we do it in a way that essentially blends our capital structure and allows us to multiply and accelerate access to finance. I think the former Prime Minister said it all in the morning. He said, it's all about the F word, the good F word. I stumbled there for a moment.
[Femi Oke] So the good F word. The good F word could be read either way.
[Admassu Yilma Tadesse] Well, exactly. For us in the continent, when we look at the access to finance problems that we have, it's not just access, it's cost and it's prohibitive. And it's gotten worse in recent years. To the point where it's just really unmanageable. So I think this is why you see the very concerted commentary coming from a former Prime Minister, because as World Bank people like to use in economic terms, the binding constraint is finance and the cost of it.
[Femi Oke] So, Dr. Vijay, about 20 minutes ago, I said, “hello, Dr. Vijay, welcome, so nice to see you”. When people say hello to you, what do you tell them that you do?
[Vijay Kumar Saraswat] Yeah, I come from India and represent an institution called National Institute for Transformation of India. That's called NITI Aayog. And my role has been primarily for science, technology, innovation in the energy, transportation and mobility sector. There has been a major focus on bringing in alternate fuels, bringing in mobility, electric mobility, bringing in climate control through decarbonization actions in the energy sector, whether it is industrial, whether it is transport or it is in the buildings, and so on. So, the focus is primarily to get finances for every of these activities which are requiring the basic inputs in developing the infrastructure, running various schemes, which will lead to what we call as the progress in that dimension. So basically, it is working between the private sector, the international financing institutions like World Bank, IMF, and so on, to generate funds on a public-private partnership basis, whether it is for alternate fuels or for India's program for mobility, e-mobility, and so on. Measures have been taken with respect to evolving new schemes. For example, yesterday we discussed what is called payment security mechanism with the World Bank and the government of US and things like that. So these are the various areas I work on, and today's discussion would be basically to showcase how India has progressed in this particular sector of transforming transportation.
[Femi Oke] Panelists, I love how pragmatic not just this conversation is about scaling up financing for low carbon transport, but the entire conference is like, we need the money. How are we going to get the money?
[Paul Bodnar] Paul, I just want to say one more thing. Vijay Kumar, I think we say the answer to your question is “it's not rocket science”. I believe we have a rocket scientist on the panel.
[Vijay Kumar Saraswat] Yes.
[Paul Bodnar] So maybe. Maybe if it does come to rocket science, you can do that part. Okay?
[Vijay Kumar Saraswat] I will be able to help the community, no problem.
[Paul Bodnar] You've left that out of your bio. But I did read it. So. Look, I think the world is not short of financial resources to do this. The problem, in particular, for those who work here in the context of the World Bank and emerging markets and developing countries, is how do you persuade private finance to flow to places where it does not ordinarily invest? And that just doesn't just mean north to south, right? It's strange when the pension fund of a country in the Global South is invested in, let's say, London real estate, as someone was telling me recently, for a country I won't name, and then people who live in that London real estate go to work at DIFFID and figure out how to support people in the country whose money is invested in London real estate. There is plenty of capital available in private markets. There is not plenty of capital available in public markets. There's a crunch in fiscal space, so public sector is squeezed. Philanthropy is a very valuable resource, but it's very limited. Even 10 billion dollars that Jeff Bezos pledged sounds like a lot of money over ten years to give away. But the world is a big place, and there's an infinite need for capital expenditure. So, we just have to be as smart as possible about how to stack these different forms of capital together, Frannie has done an amazing job at SouthBridge, teaching us all how to do that. But I think if there's one force that we can activate in service of that, that we haven't done a great job of doing, I would still say it's markets. Those of us who grew up working on climate, I've been doing it for 25 years, probably most of us in some way spent the first 20 years in and around the UNFCCC process because it's natural to think that governments are there to solve big collective action problems like climate change, right? And that's true, but we haven't really activated market forces yet that have an actual track record of driving fast, deep and broad change in the global economy. There wasn't rideshare in San Francisco 20 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago, widely available. Now there's rideshare in Ulaanbaatar. What made that happen? It wasn't policy. Right? It was entrepreneurship. The fact that solar costs have come down was supported by government policy, but it was driven by market forces as well. So, I think if I would say one thing that we need to do is to combine very smartly the limited amount of government capital we have, the even more limited but more nimble philanthropic capital we have, and figure out how to do a better job of activating markets in service of this.
[Femi Oke] Oh, go ahead. And then, Frannie, you jump in.
[Frannie Leautier] I want to agree with the last point Paul made. And sorry, I was too excited about the photo. I forgot to introduce myself. So, my past was at the World Bank, and I worked with Guang, José Irigoyen and others, Ani Dasgupta. So it's like coming home. My present is at SouthBridge Investments, where I lead an investment group that brings innovation into the challenges that Africa is facing, taking capital from outside Africa and combining it with capital within Africa. So what Paul just said, I think, is really fundamental because we have a lot of capital in private hands, which is not flowing, because it's looking for opportunities which are not visible. And entrepreneurs, as you said, are the key. So we have in this room a number of entrepreneurs who have interesting projects that they are putting their own capital to develop, and they need scaling up. But the scaling up cannot happen purely by going to the capital markets, because they don't see them. They're too risky. It won't come from the World Bank and other MDBs because they're too small. It won't come from the pension funds, because pension funds are looking for secure returns to meet their obligations, and philanthropy would not give it to them because they are for profit. So, you need a way to bring these four sources of capital in order to support those entrepreneurs who bring that change. So some of the innovations we've been engaging in are really using philanthropic capital to crowd in market resources by, for example, paying down the cost of capital, by bringing in blended solutions at the project level, by using philanthropic capital to take early risks, by using philanthropic capital to actually show how it can be done, exit and go, and take even harder problems elsewhere. So we're doing this in reforestation and restoration, where carbon markets are very critical, particularly for transport transformation because if carbon markets work, a lot of the financing that Patrick asked about in the previous panel could actually come from a properly functioning carbon market. Carbon tax is not working as well. In Paris, recently, I saw an announcement that if you have an SUV, you pay more for parking, but if your SUV is electric, you pay less. So that's a tax incentive to push the transformation towards lower carbon, but it has a huge cost because the majority of people who drive into Paris are actually lower income than those who actually live within Paris and who can walk and use bicycles. So, this is a solution that may work for some places, but not all places, because sometimes in the US as well, it's the poor who drive fossil fuel cars. So, how do we get that transformation in a way that is inclusive, would require a lot of innovation in electric mobility that can solve both problems at the same time. And then lastly, on innovation, I also, my past was working for Admassu, and we did experiment with a lot of things. We took risk, it was a commercial bank, but we took risks. And the advantage is that we took risks on our profits that then showed that it can be done, then World Bank, MIGA and others came in. And I think there is a role then for national development banks and regional development banks to actually take that early risk, but it shouldn't come at the cost to their profits because they are having members who are investing in them to get a dividend. So, there could be another role for philanthropy in this case, to actually pair up with the regional development banks to take that early experimental role, and then, the MDBs can come in with concessional finance and crowding commercial finance.
[Femi Oke] Admassu, go ahead.
[Admassu Yilma Tadesse] Well, Femi, I was very happy to hear Frannie making that connection because I think what Paul highlighted in his remarks was the perception is that capital scarce regions come to capital rich regions, cap in hand, always asking for the money, right? Now, I'm very pleased to share with the audience that when the SDGs came out and we went into a recapitalization process, we decided to hit African pension funds, African insurance companies, African sovereign wealth funds, before we crossed the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean. And today I have almost 15 shareholders who are African institutional shareholders in a capital structure that's mixed between governments and institutional investors. So, this is a classic blended capital structure that crowds in the private sector, in institutional space, and so we've managed to do it, and now we've stepped out of the continent and we're reaching out to foundations and institutional investors elsewhere. But really, the crux of the theme we're discussing today is about thematic finance. And again, for us to sort of give an opportunity that's attractive to potential investors, the rest of the world, we've come out with something called “Green Capital” so we launched Class C green shares, which we basically put out there, and we made a proposition to investors. For every dollar of green capital they put into us, we guarantee a threefold throughput in terms of the green financing that we would be doing. And we basically unveiled it at the COP27, the Sharm el-Sheikh one, the African COP, and then we practically started rolling it out at the last COP. So today we have green capital over and above the green funding that we have from strong partners like the World Bank Group. And so, we're blending equity and debt. Very thematic. And this is looking beyond green. It's also sustainability. It's about the jobs, it's the SDGs and all of that. And so, for us, we've been trying to walk the talk because in the final analysis, when you're in an African country and you face a stakeholder, they say, we go to all the conferences, everybody talks the money, nobody walks the money. So, yeah, I think there's a pipeline issue. There's an upstream problem. I think there's a point that's been made around us not having enough packaged opportunities to put out to potential investors that's received a lot of attention. We've got some great investors who've come in and they've said to us, you can keep the dividend, but not in your normal pool of money. We want to see the healthy profitability, we want to see the dividends, but put it into a special trust fund and use that dividend money to generate new projects. Take more risks, don't do it off your capital structure, because we know you're a rated bank. You have, obviously, various conventions and issues to manage on the risk side, but you have these special pools now of money that we can start being much more innovative with and help sponsors, project sponsors who are really constrained to find enough risk capital upstream, get them to actually take on more, and then throw your weight behind them.
[Femi Oke] Who says that? Who comes to a bank and tells them, “this is where you should put this, this is where you should put this amount,” because they're thinking about sustainability. Who does?
[Admassu Yilma Tadesse] You know, banks have shareholders and critical stakeholders, so you'll only do what they allow you to do in the final analysis, right? So I think that's why Paul talked about the public markets being very constrained because their owners just have no more appetite for putting more out there. So, I mean, in the end, for us, we do have a triple bottom line value proposition that we've put out to pension funds and many others, and they've allowed us to take more risk. We will go into very fragile economies. We were here about a month ago on the fragile conference, right?
[Femi Oke] Agility forum.
[Admassu Yilma Tadesse] How do you get to that last mile? How do you get to those really tough markets, right? And some could argue they're not even markets yet, they need to be made into markets. And so, the question is, when you're there. In fact, yesterday after the morning session we had with World Bank colleagues, I had an investor, a US investor, who has a very interesting green project in a country called the DRC. And basically, “there's a lot of people who want to talk to me because they love my project.” He says, “but the reality is I trust you, even though you have less than the others.” And I said, “wow, why are you saying that?” And he said, “bottom line is people don't have risk appetite, they'll get caught up in committees, they'll get caught up in policies.” In the final analysis, people just can't take that step to go into these tough, hot markets.
[Femi Oke] All right, I see the questions are lining up. I'm going to just get a perspective from India and then I'll come right back to the questions there. And then also chatting to the online people when we've got some online questions. How is India handling this idea of scaling up financing? What can you point to where you say, “okay, we've worked this out, this is working for us.”
[Vijay Kumar Saraswat] India has, right from 2018, taken very concrete steps with respect to financing the transformation of mobility. If you have heard our prime minister in 2018 and during the Global [Mobility] Summit, he mentioned that India's basis for transformation of transport sector would be based on Seven C's, which has common, connected, convenient, congestion, free change, clean and cutting edge. These are some of the things which…
[Femi Oke] The seven C's? [Vijay Kumar Saraswat] Seven C's. [Femi Oke] All right, do them now. You don't know them. [Vijay Kumar Saraswat] I know them. The clean, clear, connected change. [Femi Oke] I know you know them.
[Vijay Kumar Saraswat] These are the things which we were actually based on, which we have planned that. But in addition to that, there has been an investment which is absolutely required for doing this kind of transformation. And hence, right from the day one, we started schemes like FAME, the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of E-Mobility. The FAME One started in 2015, FAME Two started later. And basically, it was for manufacturing as well as for adoption. Then came that we should be able to reduce the cost of what madam mentioned, just like that, that the availability of the e transportation should be for the poor. And if the cost is not reduced, then you have a problem. So basically, investment on alternate chemistry cells so that you are able to reduce the cost thereby. Then, came other modes of reducing the fossil fuel emissions and hence started working on what is called biofuel programs. And then again, the Indian government started a biofuel E 20 program. For example, in the case of FAME, we pitched in with the money of something like 67 billion dollars. In the case of ACC, another similar amount. So these are the basic government initiated things. Then came how do you bring in incentives for the private sector? How do we bring it, the public and the private, to work together? We started calling the PLI schemes The Production Linked Incentives. And these production linked incentives were basically to promote the manufacturing agencies to upscale the manufacturing and if they are able to do it beyond a certain value, then the incentives are provided in that. So PLI schemes started coming in. Then, we also said that why not go for other methods of reducing emissions? And that was hydrogen as one of the carriers. So the Indian government started giving an incentive for hydrogen production, both in terms of reducing the cost of electrolyzers and bringing down the cost of hydrogen and so on. Almost about 6000 crores were identified for doing that. So you can see the financing mechanisms are both in terms of promoting the investment from the private sector and also for promoting the government to make investments on infrastructure. When we talked of infrastructure, we decided that certain corridors have to be created, whether it is on the seaside or it is on the roadside. So, we went into what is called Bharatmala program. That means you create a green corridor for the e-mobility sectors, almost about 14,000 kilometers of roadmap to create with the possibility that calling them the green corridor. Then we also said what is called Bharatmala India has got a coastline of almost about 7800 kilometers. So that 7800 kilometer waterways to be created with almost like about 14,500 crores. So this kind of investment coming from the government has helped to promote the transformation, but alongside the public-private participation has been promoted. So non banking financing institutions have been identified for promoting two wheeler, three wheeler and other e-bus programs and so on, where they should be. Like, yesterday we mentioned to you that we have a program for 5000 e busses in the country and that is also being funded through a public private partnership mode. We have Tatas and other banking agencies coming together to fund such programs. So it is the public-private combined funding, but initiatives for major infrastructure development to be taken by the government of India has been the source and the policy what we have been following.
[Femi Oke] Okay, Paul, quickly, because otherwise you'll get laser stares from the Q&A line. Go ahead.
[Paul Bodnar] So just before we get into the questions just to offer one more way of thinking about this because we want to focus on transportation. I think the 8th C I would suggest we focus on is “commerce”. The predominant sort of source of transportation emissions and journeys, even looking at this photo here has to do with commerce. Of course, people travel for all sorts of reasons. They do so for leisure and to visit their families, to go to work. And one thing that I found very useful in thinking about finance and transportation is to imagine how the place that you're trying to help or deal with is connected to other places, right? So Frannie gave us an amazing tour of this photograph. I'll give you one more quick example. One of the things we've been supporting at the Bezos Earth Fund is the development of green industrial hubs. And I recently visited the port of Los Angeles. And you imagine trying to decarbonize all of the transport related things happening at a big port. You've got huge container ships running on heavy fuel oil, right? You've got all the heavy equipment that's used to move containers around, running on diesel. And then you have, in the case of the port of Los Angeles, 20,000 trucks a day coming in to unload these containers and take them where they need to go also running on diesel. If you build out a hydrogen economy or a combination of electrifying and powering with hydrogen, the heavy transport system, you have to think about how these places are connected and creating entire value chains that don't exist today. So, let's just not forget that achieving our goals on transportation does often rebound to fixing the energy system. And some of that is just about scaling the systems we have, scaling grids and making it possible to generate more green electricity, but some of it is about creating an entirely new energy system around green molecules.
[Femi Oke] Thank you for your patience, sir. Go ahead.
[Audience member 1] Well, you're welcome. The question is relatively simple. Private capital can invest if there is a return on investment, but for transforming in particular cities, you have some investment that doesn't have any return. I just speak about sidewalk or if you are doing a cycling lane, there is no return on investment. And most probably for the infrastructure of heavy public transport infrastructure like metro or rail line, you have no return on investment on the infrastructure part. On the operation, you have a return on investment on the infrastructure, you have not. So, the question is in line with what the Prime Minister said in the first panel. Where can we mobilize finance, perhaps through carbon market, to have actually grants that will come in developing country for being able to finance those infrastructure that will not be possibly financed by the private sector, because basically there is no return on investment?
[Femi Oke] Frannie.
[Frannie Leautier] That's an excellent question. And I'll give an example and then go to, I think, where we can go for finance. So the example is Lomé in Togo, where you have a private company called Spiro that manufactures electric motorcycles. They're able to do that profitably because they were given for a number of years the monopoly on the charging stations and the monopoly on the swapping of batteries. So that's a way where the government, through incentives, can create a pathway for private investment. Now, the challenge they're having is scaling, particularly going to the rural areas. And the second challenge is affordability for individuals to actually purchase those electric bikes. How do they solve it? They lease to own, and they use the mobile wallets to actually repay or take money, you could say, from the drivers, to make sure they don't default, because they're a private company, so they need to make a profit. And what that does is it puts discipline into the ridership, because they are able to actually work the number of days to earn a living and also repay the loan and eventually own the bike. So, I think this is a kernel of a solution, but why does it work in the case of Lomé? Because the government, and this is coming to Paul's example, invested in an industrial park that brought in 100% private financing to get value out of the cotton value chain. So, you have all these bikes now able to carry cargo to go to the industrial park, to leverage the port of Lomé to export. And I think this sort of integrated approach to different forms of infrastructure with commerce as a driver, could really be a solution, because all the people you see there, they're trading something in that photo. They're bringing vegetables to be sold, they are buying things. So there's a lot of trade happening there. And if you can link the trade solution to the decarbonization solution, I think the financing unlocks itself, but there's a very important role for government, because the government can pave the way. And this is how the United States was developed when the early investments were made. For instance, for railways, there were private investments, and the private investors were given years of monopoly in order to be able to operate profitably. What, we have forgotten a little bit about that, because I agree we've gone for competitive markets, etcetera, but we've forgotten that for public goods, such monopoly rights could actually help unlock private financing. And we need to relook at our economics to get the right financing.
[O’Neall Massamba] We have a question online.
[Femi Oke] Oh, we have a question online. I'm going to pause the question online. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And pause the questions for now because I need to hit the coffee break. Okay? So, I'm going to hit the coffee break. Thank the speakers on the stage. Gentlemen behind the microphone, thank you for standing up for a whole ten minutes. And I'm going to invite you to come to the side of the stage, speak to our speakers one on one, have a great conversation with them as we head into the coffee break. I also want to send you out, if you're in this space, to the knowledge exhibition in the atrium let me tell you what will be there. Alcohol simulation goggles. It's exactly what it sounds like. You put the goggles on and you will feel drunk, but you don't have to drink anything. I will race you to the atrium to try those goggles on. Also, in the atrium in the knowledge exhibition area, delivery robots. What is the future of robots taking goods and produce around the world? You can see that. And if you can brace the chilly DC air just outside, we have an electric shuttle. You can get on that. Have a look around that so we can practice transforming transportation even during the coffee break. But for now, let's thank very loudly the speakers of plenary one. Thank you. [Applause]
[Femi Oke] Day two of transforming transportation 2024. I am your conference MC and moderator. My name is Femi Oke. Thank you for already being seated. I don't even have to ask you to be seated. If you're online, welcome. It's so good to see you on World Bank live. We have a hybrid conference, and you online around the world are as much part of TT 2024 as anyone who's in the Preston auditorium right now. Lean in. We're looking forward to your contribution. To do that hashtag TTDC 24 is how you communicate with us if you're online. If you're in the room, you'll see that microphone just towards the front in the aisle. When you feel a need to be part of the conversation, stand there. You will get my attention. And about 50 minutes later, I will come to you. I won't make you wait that long. Thank you so much for being with us today. Also, I have to say thank you to our lead sponsor, FedEx, and also our development partner, FIA Foundation. Without these two partners, we would not be able to be here today. So we thank both of them profusely. If you're wondering what is coming up today, I don't blame you. Wherever you see the QR scan, underneath the Transforming Transportation branding, that is how you can find out what is on the agenda, more details about all of the sessions, where you need to be next. So use that QR scan. We start our conversation today with three ministers. They take us to Malawi, to Chile, to Lesotho, and really talking about their visions for resilient transportation, how they're going to get that done, really dig deep into their concrete plans. And you can also talk to them as well. Minister of Energy for Malawi, Ibrahim Matola. Please come and sit in either chair. Number two, three or four, your choice. Thank you, Minister. Juan Carlos Muñoz, Minister of Transport and Telecommunications for Chile. Nice to see you. Thank you so much. Take a seat there. And then Minister of public works and transport for Lesotho, Neo Matjato Moteane. Welcome, sir. Please take a seat. Thank you so much. Let us start. We always talk about problem. Minister, I'm sorry, you've got the short straw. You have to sit next to me, which is right here. I do apologize. Thank you so much. We often talk, ministers, about your challenges, the problems, how difficult your job is. But where I would like to start is vision. And I don't know if your vision is in one-year time, ten years’ time, 20 years’ time, but your vision for resilient Transport. Minister Muñoz, you start for Chile.
[Juan Carlos Muñoz] Thank you very much, Femi. I'm very glad to be here. I think I've attended like ten times this conference and I love it very much. Since it gives us, when I was in academia, this link with policymakers that allow us to kind of walk with both feet. I think it was really a great experience and I'm very proud to be here now representing my country. I think now we have of course, one of the main challenge of our time. And when we think about transportation, to me at least, it's kind of clear that we may be too many in this planet, at least according to the way we inhabit it today. And that of course needs to make a think on how we habitate the world, especially on the transportation side, which it seems to be more difficult to adapt to the new conditions of the impact we are making in the world. It seems to me that we need to be much more careful, we need to be much more responsible, and of course we need to think our transport sector in terms of how do we adapt, how do we reduce the impact we make in the world in terms of emissions. And this I think we need to tackle both how do the transport sector suffer from climate change and how do we avoid the transport sector to cause more of the climate change we are observing. In terms of suffering, my first call would be, we need to have infrastructure that is much more resilient. I would like to mention one little example. Last year we bought the first six super-fast trains for the country. We were so proud. It was the most modern trains in South America. They arrived on June, but on August we have amazing rains, rains that were above the usual isotherm, all the snow melted. So we have high rain, very high altitude, amazing floods, and six of our bridges collapsed. So the trains we had bought to fight climate change and have an amazing experience and to enhance public transport couldn't be run yet in the whole span because our infrastructure collapsed. And that, I think, makes us think also on how do we adapt our infrastructure in advance to prevent these things that will be happening. I mean, the floods were the highest in a century, fine. But who in this room can doubt that this will happen again soon, because the weather is changing, the climate is changing. So the first thing here is we need to take a look at our infrastructure and to make it more resilient to these kind of events. The second element, I think, when we think of how do we make our transport system sector be less responsible of the climate change we're observing, I think, is urban density. It's very impressive when you compare cities. I mean, we in this room, probably many of us, have been able to visit many, many different cities. And it's so evident when you see a city that the transport footprint is obviously much smaller than others. And it has to do, in my opinion, with urban density. You visit Hong Kong, and I'm not sure we all want to live in a city like Hong Kong, but the footprint that you see there is, of course, much smaller than in a city like this one or mine. So I think we need to consider and try to emphasize that urban sprawl is no longer okay, I think. And that's something that we need to fight, that we need to put it very high in our agendas. It also makes, of course, the transportation of services much cheaper much more affordable for the government, for people. So it's clear, in my opinion, that's the second challenge we need to do. Third one would be, I think, affordability and convenience. How do we make public transport more affordable, more convenient in our country? We have moved ahead with, we're proud of a program where we have given a cap of the money somebody will pay for public transport in a month if they use a QR code. And we're very happy that more and more people are using it and enjoying it and having like 7, 10 day trips free per month. And of course, when you know that you will reach the limit, you perceive that all your trips are free in the month, all of them, not only the number 31, because if you know that the number 31 is going to be free, in one sense, you feel that any extra trip you make along the whole month is free for you And that's something we're doing and we want to probably enhance. And finally, I think especially for this room, I think a final comment is that we need to not to be fell in love with a specific transport mode. I think we need to understand transportation as a system and we need to design them and operate them in a way that we take advantage of them as such, as a system. So I think that all the connections between bikes and trains and busses and taxis and cars, I think are relevant.
[Femi Oke] Minister Matola, for Malawi, your vision for resilient transport, take us into it, describe it. [Ibrahim Matola] Thank you very much. I'll start by saying, [speaks foreign language] [Femi Oke] And now we have no more time left for the session [audience laughs] but we appreciate you welcoming us in so many languages. You are Minister of Energy. Are you stalling for time here, Minister? Go ahead.
[Ibrahim Matola] I'm very glad that I'm talking to the right audience, the decision makers in terms of finance, the World Bank and the world at large. Malawi is a land linked country. In the east bordering Mozambique, in the west bordering Zambia, and in the north bordering Tanzania. Issues of energy and transport, intertwining, you cannot separate them. It is an issue of a chicken and egg. Let me start by quoting an African proverb which says a cat that dreams of becoming a lion must start losing appetite of rats and [unintelligible]. We are here discussing about the future, of the future generations. Malawi has got a blueprint, the one which we call Malawi 2063 agenda in support with African Union agenda. If the World Bank wants to walk alone, it won't work. This is the time where we need also to look into the African proverb which says, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others, end of quote. This is the time where we need to work together. Don't leave us behind. As a continent, take us as partners in the development of this world. Africa has got abundant resources. Everything what we are talking here, the past two days, the resources are in Africa, but we are taken as a dumping site. Time has come where a one hand cannot clap. In Swahili they say [speaks foreign language]. We need each other. In order for us to fulfill these agendas, we need your support. And the support which we are looking for is finance. Without conditionalities attached to the way you give money for democracy. For democracy there is no conditionalities attached to. But when it comes for infrastructure, you give us a lot of pages with conditionalities attached to and to fulfill. And the end result is you label us as a risk country, where you cannot invest. The investment in Africa is very, very important. Africa first should be given an opportunity to change the curriculum. Where our schools, we are still teaching them Who discovered Africa? [Unintelligible] who discovered River Niger? How many parts are in [Unintelligible]. Change should come. When you look at China, India 20 years ago, we were together at the same level. We're not developed, but because our friends invested a load in education, science, innovation. I'll give you a story of a Malawian who harnessed the wind. And he was taken, he's somewhere here in America, he harnessed wind.
[Femi Oke] I think he's in Maryland.
[Ibrahim Matola] Thank you very much. These are the things which African were born natural engineers, natural innovators. What we need is just support. And that support should come from the Bank. Without conditionalities. If you don't support us, we'll follow you. Every day an African child, nine out of ten, are dying crossing the Mediterranean Sea, going into Europe, looking for future and green pastures. We'll follow you wherever you are. For that not to be done, we need to invest a lot in Africa, because Malawi in the 80s, we were manufacturing batteries. Malawi in the 1880s, we had [unintelligible] where a farmer just in the doorstep, he can sell his pineapples, his bananas. But today, because of the structural adjustments which were imposed, we lost everything. And a farmer to take his goods or her goods from the farm to the selling point, it takes ages. And the end results, the broken system of our transportation, they end up losing the whole produce. And next year you won't have appetite of growing pineapples, growing avocado, because the industries are not there. Value addition. We need also to be given an opportunity to have our industries. And these industries can only take place when we have power. You will sponsor us with a lot of vaccines, and we end up those vaccines not reaching to the intended people, and we end up disposing them, in order to please you on a campaign of vaccinating everybody, whether he or she is not sick. What we need is to have power and transport to take those vaccines to the rural areas. The majority of Malawians are living in the rural area. For them to have equal opportunities on resilient transportation and also energy, we need to give them what they are supposed to. Equal opportunities, sustainable, reliable, affordable transport. Malawi spends a lot of money, almost half a billion of US dollars, on fossil fuel. This is the time we are talking, planning about the future of e-mobility. It is a welcome development, but we need to move together in order to transit in this journey. However, as Malawian government, led by his Excellency, the state president Dr. Lazarus M. Chakwera, we have tried to review some of the laws. There are some which are non-legislative reforms, and legislative reforms. We need more support, so that these reforms can fit in with the new technologies which are just coming in. The participation of private sector. His Excellency administration has tried to accommodate the private sector, whether in the energy and also in the transportation. But what we need is to have all these incorporated into our systems to review, and we need that money today. I hope, as I said, that I'm speaking to the right audience. I hope when I'm leaving this conference, I will come out with a blank check, [audience laughs] so that these things should start tomorrow. We mustn't delay you to develop this world. We are trying to build the future of our generations and generations to come. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel. I was not taught how to swim. But most of us who are here, we spend millions of dollars in order to be taught how to swim. African child is so blessed by having skills. Even to make a car. I drove a car even if without knowing or seeing it. But I made it from the wires or from the clay. So African child needs just capacity building. And also to review our laws, so that they can fit in the new technologies which are coming. The vision of his excellency, Dr. Lazarus M. Chakwera is to move together with the world. And by the way, Malawi has its energy resources, from clean energy, hydro. We depend on hydro and also solar. What we need is bring your investment. And don't take Africa or Malawi as the whole continent which is a fragile state. There are some, yes, in the continent. But don't label the continent of Africa or countries and states in Africa as a whole state, that which is fragile. I thank you and you're most welcome to come and invest in Malawi.
[Femi Oke] That is an epic vision. Thank you. We will keep in touch to see when you leave the World Bank headquarters what you leave with. Hope maybe. Thank you, Minister. Minister Moteane, I'd really like to hear, we would really love to hear your vision for Lesotho, regarding resilient transportation. And also transportation that impacts everybody's lives.
[Neo Matjato Moteane] Thank you. After the honorable minister, it is clear why we're here. So if you give him the check, just give me a smaller one, we'll take it. I think maybe just to put it in context again, where we come from, where we sit. As I was on the stage here yesterday and explained that we are a landlocked country which is enclaved, which means it is totally enclaved by another state, which is the republic of South Africa. That limits our options, that limits our outlook in some ways. But on being a small state, we are 2 million in population. The choices for small states appear to be that one. If you want to industrialize, if you want to develop, you have limitations. The usual limitations, the size of the population, the market, all those things. So you have no option but to look outside. And you have no option but to ensure that you are well connected to the outside. So we are big on connectivity. We are big on connectivity to our neighbor as well as beyond through some of his networks or her networks. And we need as a country to get in a very cost-efficient manner to the various ports. So that we can export our goods from there. That's a big priority for us. That's what we need to work on. Of course, in order to achieve that, one needs to have an internal network of connectivity that is working to connect various towns and cities to one another. In that regard, I think we made a lot of progress with various development partners, including the World Bank. We are at a stage where we estimate that within the next five years or so, we will have our desired national network of roads in order for us to connect better within ourselves. Then what we need to do is from our— Lesotho has done relative to what it can do, has invested quite significantly in this regard. The challenge for us. I know you're looking for a vision, not for a challenge. The challenge for us is now to ensure we work with our neighbor, to ensure that from our borders up to points of exports, the movement of trade is smooth. So we are looking at regional integration in that regard. Most southern African countries have got different corridors being developed. We are working on our corridor to connect the [Unintelligible] transfrontier corridor and to do some work on that. And we are looking at that with the bank currently to have a component of that. We don't deal with big numbers, luckily, so I'll express my numbers in percentage terms. We are working towards a strategic plan that says, as far as roads are concerned, we need to do 25% of the road network. We have the national grid, the primary one, in order to get to where we need. But what's a challenge for Lesotho is there's no point doing these roles if we lose the investments you make, like you are in Chile because of weather, because of inclement weather conditions. So we need to improve, and we have worked out improving our resilience in order to be able to achieve that. We also need to attract movement of logistics through our country from one end of our neighbor to the other end through our country. How are we going to achieve that? We need to understand that to continue the narrative of looking at a road network in terms of cost per kilometer, while that is important, what we really need to do, what does it do from a climate action perspective? We have a project on the table where we can cut on one of the networks in South Africa about 300 km if we directed their national networks through our country. The benefit of that is not just that the routes are shorter. We must make just sure that as well, that a lot of efficiency is achieved through that way. So those are the areas as Lesotho are looking at. We are looking at it in terms of five years to get the basic planning right. I think I'll stop at the station.
[Femi Oke] Okay. If you would like to talk to the minister from Chile, from Malawi, from Lesotho, now is your opportunity to do it in this room. Please stand behind that microphone. Let me just check in to see what is happening online. Do we have any feedback online? No, they are listening, they are fascinated, but not commenting.
[Audience Member 1] About the conversation, but not really a lot of questions, more assertions. So thank you. [Femi Oke] Okay. All right, appreciate. Go ahead. Go ahead, please. [Audience Member 1] I'm [Unintelligible] from Brazil. I'd like to ask a question to Minister Juan Carlos, who happens to be a great friend. I mean, he has a very solid academic background, was leading one of the key research institutions in transportation in the world, and now he is in the other side of the balcony there, leading as a minister. So I like to have some sort of reflections on your hopes and all the things you want still to do because you, I think, midterm or about that. So how are you feeling in that situation, and do you think this will be really helpful? I mean, all this background, solid background you have into transitioning from theory to practice. [audience laughs]
[Juan Carlos Muñoz] Easy one? Yeah, very easy. Tony, I think that I will make a parallel. When I used to run more than once an interdisciplinary research center, there may be some academic here. There were usually very clear distances between different disciplines where you would say, there are some disciplines that would address this problem on some way and another one in another. And the strength of the academic center was to have them working together, discussing together, and approaching problems more integrally. My perception in these two years as minister, or my kind of pain, is that I feel like the government is also very fragmented. And it's very difficult for a minister of a specific topic to insinuate that a different minister, let's say housing, in my case, public works, energy, environment, should be doing things differently because my perception or my vision tells otherwise. So it seems to me that within government, we need to formalize, institutionalize more this intersectorial approach to problems, because the problems, the challenging problems we're dealing with are no longer which technology will we choose for the train or how many houses will we build. But more like, really, the approach for, as I said before, urban density. Isn't that a very complicated problem that doesn't lie in one specific sector? And the problem we have is that you have these several horses speeding up as much as they can with very specific targets. On how many houses are you going to build? How many passengers will you take in your public transport system? How many millions of dollars will you invest in terms of public works? And the incentives are not really to stop, to talk and to take wiser decisions, in my opinion. And the problem is most likely if you do, the benefits will not be observed in your term. So I'm not sure that the incentives we have or takes us towards this common table in which the question is how should the city be structured and how do we address those very difficult and harmful decisions in the short term that will give us a lot of benefits in the long term. It seems to me that we may need more an intersectoral approach, that at least we have the committees, but still we enter the committee with a very clear badge. I'm the transportation person, I'm the housing person, I'm the public work person. And I think that needs to be in some way tackled so that these more clear problems are addressed adequately. [Femi Oke] Please go ahead.
[Audience Member 2] Thank you. My name is Joseph Mendel and I come from Liberia and I work for radars for health. We use motorcycle to transport health products and specimen from the health facilities to the laboratory for rapid diagnosis. My first point is I would like to commend our speakers and the organizer for having me here today. Firstly, I'm looking the room and I'm still thinking, correct me if I'm wrong, if there's a direct representation of the African Union or ecosystem in this room. This question comes to mind because considering the global platform that we are about to build in transforming transportation, Africa has a very big stick into this transformation, this process or these processes. With the minister speech that he just made or his comment, I would like to recommend that harnessing the resources, especially brains and experiences in this room, I think it will be good if we can encourage our African partners to be a part of this transformation decision-making processes.
[Femi Oke] Joseph, thank you for your recommendation. Did you have a question? I'm going to leave it with your recommendation. We're also going to be hearing from in just a moment, the VP for Eastern and Southern Africa at the World Bank. So definitely Africa is in this room. Joseph. Thank you. If you see Joseph during the coffee break, he will show you the pictures of this remarkable way of transporting goods and medicines around Liberia. If you've been to Liberia, the road system is not the best. It's quite challenging and those motorbikes are the ways to get around. Joseph has on his phone that system, So have a listen and have a look when you get a chance in the coffee break. Yes, please. Last question.
[Audience Member 3] Hi, thank you so much. My name is Ryan Sklar. I'm with NG impact, formerly WRI. My question is pretty simple. If you did leave with a blank check, what's the first and most impactful thing you'd want to do with the money? And I'd appreciate maybe a very quick response from all three of the panelists. Could even just be a sentence or maybe even just a word.
[Femi Oke] Let's start with the minister who asked for the blank check? And let me just remind you, minister, that everybody laughed when you asked for that blank check. It might have been nervous laughter, but I like the question very much. Go ahead. What would you do with the money?
[Ibrahim Matola] First, as I highlighted the challenges which we are facing in terms of transportation and the energy issues in the country Malawi, we need to put things in order. When we are talking about transportation, let's look at our road network. And there is also a roadmap for Africa union connecting from Cape to Cairo. But is it real with the demarcations which are there, and different targets and different working hours within the member states? If we can invest first in energy, like what my president said on the 9 February when he was speaking to the nation and the world at large, that the first priority in the energy sector is to add more power to the grid.
[Femi Oke] So, Minister Matola, as we're coming to the end of this session, I'm going to say, so you're going to put the money to a road network, because remember, this is an imaginary blank check. So I'm going to move on quite swiftly. Thank you.
[Ibrahim Matola] Yes. As we are going towards the road network, also electric e-mobility. We need to have more power.
[Femi Oke] All right. Obviously [unintelligible] saying “imaginary blank check, I do not know. The day is still young.” Minister Moteane, what would you do with finances, investment that was inspired by TT 2024?
[Neo Matjato Moteane] Right. If I did get a blank check, I'd write a figure on it, and the figure would be about 3 billion on the road network. And that would be resilient, that would be comprehensive, and that would connect the country sufficiently. The second thing I would do is to ask for the next check. And the next check would be to transform Lesotho's potential in hydro to a degree that it can become a significant player in the production of carbon-free fuel, in particular hydrogen. Do you want to know what I would do as a third check? The last thing I would do is also to transform Lesotho's economy to a true energy, green energy production. No hybrid. Just go straight for that, because that's all we can do at this point in time. Thank you.
[Femi Oke] All right, I'm going to call this potential investment from TT 24. Minister Muniz.
[Juan Carlos Muñoz] Thank you, Femi. In our case, we have moved ahead very fast with the electromobility agenda. I’m very proud we can tell that Santiago, Chile is the city in the world with more electric busses outside from China. It's 2500 busses, electric busses. It's really impressive and it's changing the way our city moves. One first inclination is to say we would move ahead with that agenda faster and probably make it happen not only in Santiago but in the rest of the country. But I think that we need to move a little bit out of the system to answer the question and understand that even though, yeah, electromobility is relevant because it allows us to reduce emissions and emissions is the main challenge we have. I think, the emissions are not only depending on the transport mode we use, but also, I think, the distance we travel, the number of trips we make per day, the energy needed per transport mode. So I would put some of the money in making our city more compact. I would put some of the money on putting public housing on higher density in well located places. I would put some of the money on good jobs near to where people live. Let me tell you one little story.
[Femi Oke] Minister Muñoz. It's a very short story. In about 30 seconds. Is that possible? Fantastic.
[Juan Carlos Muñoz] We have probably most of your countries, a lot of male drivers, bus drivers and very rarely a female driver. We have made a systematic effort in asking our bus companies to hire women. And for them it has become an amazing opportunity to find a formal job. Not only find it, but also close to where they live. Bus terminals are in the periphery, so we need to put some of the jobs closer to where people live and that will also allow to reduce our carbon footprint. So I think we need to take— Electromobility is great and we feel so proud. Trains are amazing, but we need to address the problem rigorously and from a broader perspective.
[Femi Oke] I think what I hear here is not imagination for a blank check. I hear purpose, commitment, concrete plans. When you have the investment. Nobody even missed a beat in terms of what would you do with more investment. Ministers, we thank you so much for spending time on the TT stage today. Thank you very much. Thank you. [Audience applauds] Thank you very much. Thank you. All right.
[Ibrahim Matola] I think we can take a group photo here. [Femi Oke] Oh, yes, please take a group. Please take a group photograph with me. Okay. All right. I was going to continue with the program, but I am being commanded by a minister who has so many quotes about Africa, I have to actually pose. [Ibrahim Matola] Together we can.
[Femi Oke] All right, together we can. Thank you. This is good trouble right here. Good trouble. Excellent. All right, thank you. Ministers, do take your belongings with you. As we move on with our program today, Victoria Kwakwa is the vice president of Eastern and Southern Africa for the World Bank. When I asked Victoria about what is the headline for what you're going to deliver as your keynote for us today, Victoria said, possibilities and partnerships. Victoria, the mic is yours.
[Victoria Kwakwa] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Femi. Good morning everybody. It's such a pleasure to be here with this August audience at TT 24. I hear this is the 21st edition of it. So congratulations to all of you for keeping this going. Clearly it's worth the money and it's worth the time that all of you put in here. So thank you all for being here and thank you to the organizers for giving me a chance to give this keynote address. I'd like also to thank the ministers for their panel. I enjoyed listening to you and hearing about your vision and some of what you would do with your blank checks. Anyway, to our topic of this morning, I think we're all here because we recognize that transport plays a key role in driving economic growth and fostering development by supporting the creation of jobs and connecting people to economic opportunities and services. Yet we also know that the way people and goods circulate contributes significantly to climate change, accounting for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And this is growing faster than any other sector except industry. We know that climate hazards are also affecting every aspect of the transport value chain. So there's an urgent need to rethink the way transport infrastructure and services are developed to mitigate and reduce their impact on climate change and ensure resilience to guarantee everyone has access to safe, efficient and affordable transport with a smaller climate footprint. First and foremost, resilient and sustainable transport systems are critical to tackle the development challenges developing countries face. Climate related disasters disproportionately impact the poor. Over the past 50 years, climate-related disasters have caused more than 800,000 fatalities and over $1 trillion in economic loss. And marginalized communities are disproportionately bearing the impact of climate change and natural hazards, especially in lower income countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 90% of disasters and weather are climate-driven. And by 2030, up to 118,000,000 extremely poor people on the continent living on less than a dollar a day, $1.25 a day, will be exposed to climate hazards. These are huge numbers that we're talking about developing climate resilient transport systems, not only pieces of infrastructure, to increase access to social and economic opportunities to address food crisis, vulnerability and fragility situations is therefore an obligation, especially in our work in Africa. The multifaceted crisis faced in the last years have significantly upended the transport sector and taught us that improving the resilience and efficiency of the global transport and logistics systems is crucial to better adapt to changing global circumstances and emerging crisis to fight rising food insecurity to address situations of fragility and security. This is especially true in the poorest countries. Investing in climate resilient infrastructure systems provides also significant socioeconomic benefits to other sectors. The development and improvement of all year passable rural roads in sub-Saharan Africa has spillover benefits to agriculture systems and public services such as healthcare and education. This is evident all across Africa, but also in other parts of the world. For example, in rural Morocco, the enrollment of girls in primary schools surged from 17% to 54% when their access to roads improved. Climate resilient transport systems are crucial for sustainable development. Investing in transport systems and transport system resilience reduces the adverse impacts of climate change and natural hazards on economies. It avoids large, costly infrastructure repairs and minimizes the wide ranging consequences on people's well-being, especially on the well-being of vulnerable groups. The extra cost of building resilience into infrastructure systems brings substantial savings in maintenance and repair and reduces disruptions to the economy. Universal access to affordable and reliable infrastructure services support strong economic growth and high productivity and promotes distributive equity. But by climate resilient transport systems, I'm not just referring to climate resilience of specific transport assets, a road or a railway link, for example, or even climate resilience of a transport network. I'm referring to a system that has end-users in mind, a system that addresses the climate resilience of transport throughout its entire lifecycle, starting with planning through engineering and design, investment, operations and maintenance, institutional capacity and coordination, and ending with contingency planning, including early warning signals and post disaster recovery, such as insurance. Such systems are lacking in Africa and in other parts of the developing world and will take time to implement. The World Bank is starting to work with a few countries to help build these systems. Implementing climate-resilient infrastructure investment is costly and will require significant contributions from the international community. It is therefore important for high income countries to start balancing climate support between mitigation and adaptation. Beyond adaptation, shifting to low carbon and greener transportation modes represents a huge opportunity for developing countries, notably in Africa, especially on two fronts. Urban mobility, which has been mentioned already, and greener logistics. On urban mobility, shifting to more efficient modes of urban transport is indeed a fantastic opportunity for developing countries. African cities, notably to leapfrog and avoid being locked in a car-centric development. Sub Saharan Africa is the lowest contributor to global carbon emissions by far. Yet while motorization rates are low, most cities are congested with old and unsafe vehicles, polluting people's lives and not providing efficient and safe transport, especially for women, for children and for the elderly. With the majority of city populations still walking and using some form of public transport, this presents an opportunity to avoid a car centric development and promoting instead efficient, affordable and inclusive modes of transportation and more livable cities. I'd like to highlight three promising agendas. The BRT agenda active mobility and e mobility. BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit, with busses running on segregated lanes, offer advantages similar to metro systems but at a significantly lower cost. They significantly reduce congestion, pollution and GHG emissions while meeting the growing mobility demand and improving access to jobs. The BRT in Dakar, for example, the first fully electric BRT in Africa, will have a positive impact on air quality by encouraging the use of public transportation and shifting to a full electric fleet. 1.8 million tons in GHG emission savings are expected over 30 years, roughly the equivalent of getting 260,000 cars off the road while providing an affordable, convenient and safe mode of transportation for more than 300,000 passengers daily. Other cities are following in the same direction. In [Unintelligible], for example, which will soon have the largest BRT network across sub-Saharan African cities, with one line in operation, three under construction and two more planned, electrification is actively being pursued as the network expansion takes place. Active mobility walking and biking maximizes the socioeconomic benefits of investing in low carbon emitting transport infrastructure. Investments in pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, coupled with complementary education and training programs, foster access to jobs and essential services, especially when integrated with public transport networks. Cycling is also a quick to implement strategy, with shorter implementation timelines compared to metro or BRT projects. In Addis Abeba and most cities in Ethiopia, walking and cycling are primary means of transport, and in 2020, the Ethiopian Ministry of Transport and Logistics launched a ten-year non-motorized transport strategy aimed at institutionalizing a more equitable access to transport most often used by Ethiopians, while addressing the country's objective to reduce GHG emissions by 64% by 2030. A World Bank finance project, Transport Systems Improvement Project, served as an entry point to support the shift to more active, safe and affordable means of transportation in Ethiopia. Transition to e-mobility is also an opportunity sub Saharan Africa is starting to rapidly embrace. For transport decarbonization, a recent flagship report that the World Bank produced shows that the electrification of transport can be constructive, cost effective, and financially sustainable in developing countries, notably for e-busses and two and three-wheelers. The potential benefits of electric mobility for low and middle income countries go well beyond decarbonization to include promoting inclusive mobility, improving local air quality, bolstering energy security, and democratizing manufacturing. Examples of development of whole value chains of e-vehicles can be seen in Kenya, in Uganda and Rwanda. On green logistics shifting, freight traffic to lower emissions modes of transport is crucial to address the adverse impacts of transport logistics on the environment and people's health, while meeting the rising demand for logistics activities in developing country countries. Freight transport and logistics is a critical enabler of economic and social development. The demand for logistics activity is expected to rise as lower middle income countries grow under business as usual conditions. That growth will lead to substantial increases in GHG emissions. Therefore, decoupling the growth in logistics activity from the growth in GHG emissions is urgently needed. Switching to greener logistics can be done by using greener and more energy-efficient transport modes, optimizing transport routes, and investing in alternative fuel technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells and renewable natural gas. In East Africa, the central corridor, a multimodal logistics corridor linking five landlocked countries of the Great Lakes region with a port of Dar es-Salam in Tanzania, is critical towards improved regional integration. As one of the ministers mentioned, the government of Tanzania is upgrading the port for additional throughput as well as the existing railway line and is constructing a new higher speed railway line to support module shift from the very congested corridor road as lower carbon alternative, with the existing railway line focusing on bulky cargo, the new railway on container traffic. The World Bank Group is ready to support countries in scaling up financing for sustainable and climate resilient transport infrastructure with objectives to address both climate adaptation and climate mitigation equally. The financing needs faced by governments and cities to transition to low carbon and resilient transport infrastructure are enormous. As you all know, an estimated of $93 trillion of sustainable infrastructure needs to be built by 2030. For sub-Saharan African countries, the World Bank estimates the need for investment to be equal to 7% of their GDP annually in SDG related infrastructure when they have only been investing 3.5% of GDP due to lack of available financial resources. The needs are fierce in cities, which represent 50% of the world's population but account for 70% of global CO2 emissions. Although urbanization is a driver of growth. Unplanned and rapid urbanization can contribute to increasing greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to shocks. Local governments and cities are eager to take steps to become low carbon and climate resilient, but they are facing challenges to adequately plan and prepare for these projects due to insufficient capacity and resources, and local governments also face challenges to access funding. The World Bank is committed to support countries in scaling finance for both climate adaptation and mitigation, and the bank is already the largest provider of financing for transport globally. Since 2017, the transport global practice has committed about $14.9 billion in low carbon and climate resilient actions through 177 projects. 40% of these actions are for Sub-Saharan Africa, where they amount to $6 billion through 70 projects. We can do more and we will do more as announced at COP 28 by our World Bank president, who set an ambitious objective to devote 45% of annual financing of the World Bank to climate-related projects. The transport sector has a big role to play in delivering on this, but the World Bank cannot do it alone and we need support from all partnerships, as Femi mentioned. The World Bank is at the forefront of solutions to mobilize financing for sustainable and resilient transport infrastructure. The funding gap for infrastructure in developing countries is substantial and exceeds the capabilities of governments alone. Mobilizing private capital and other partners is therefore essential. The transport sector presents significant opportunities for private capital investment. A few examples. Private capital mobilization and mass transit systems. The Dakar BRT project, for instance, received support from various entities including the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, IFC, Meagher, the government, and the private sector. Financing of the BRT electric busses indeed mobilized 144,000,000 dollars in private sector funding facilitated through a public private partnership supported by IFC. Private capital mobilization and multimodal top corridors as the market for green minerals grows rapidly. Implementing multimodal corridors, often critical for food security, will require capital intensive investments and offer huge opportunities for private capital mobilization. In a context of rapidly rising global demand for green minerals, the World Bank is committed to supporting the governments in creating the enabling environment to attract this private capital. And Meagher and World Bank joint efforts to fund climate resilient roads in Kenya is another example. In the past two years, Meagher has provided over $186,000,000 in guarantees to assist the Kenyan government in attracting crucial foreign investment for its extensive road enhancement scheme. This program is set to refurbish 10,000 kilometers of roads, which will not only double the asphalt surfaced roads in the country, but also have many journey times within the east African nation. Additionally, the program is designed with climate adaptation features such as the installation of more substantial and expansive drains, pipes and culverts. In closing, the World Bank is committed to scaling finance for low carbon and resilient transport systems in developing countries. Mobilization of all international finance institutions, the private sector, high income countries will be critical to meet their dire financing needs, and we believe this effort should tackle both climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. We stand ready to lead this collective effort. Thank you so much for your attention. I'd now like to give the floor to our senior managing director, Mr. Axel von Trotsenburg, who unfortunately can't be here today, but he recognizes the importance of what all of you are doing here and so is joining through a video, a short video that will be presented right away. Thank you very much.
[Axel von Trotsenburg] Colleagues, partners, ministers and guests, hello. Thank you for joining us for transforming transportation. Although I can't be with you in person, I wanted to share my thoughts about the crucial links between transport and resilience. The world is facing a myriad of challenges right now, climate change, natural disaster, food insecurity and others, all of which threaten our development goals. Transport is central to overcoming all these challenges, especially in three particular ways. First, globally, natural hazards cause $15 billion in direct damages to transport infrastructure every year, and roads, bridges, railways or public transit system we build today must be able to withstand the intensifying climate risk of tomorrow. At the World Bank, we are responding by promoting climate proof transport infrastructure. A few weeks ago, our board approved a $452,000,000 financing for the Assam Resilient Rural Bridges program, which will repair and ensure the climate resilience of more than 1000 bridges that connect over 1.8 million people across over 1700 villages in rural India. Second, resilient transport provides continuity in the wake of disasters, ensuring that people in vulnerable places have consistent access to the supplies and services they need, even in a crisis. Our work on resilient transport infrastructure in the Pacific islands is a testament to this. Upgraded roads and seawalls help life to go on, even when climate change throws people on the coastline's curveballs after curveball. And finally, resilient transport is the engine that keeps the global economy running. Recent events have demonstrated just how important well-functioning ports and supply chains are to global markets. Major gaps remain in this area. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, transport costs can represent up to 50% of food prices, and over a third of the food produced in Africa is lost due to poor logistics. At the World Bank, we are committed to ensuring resilience in transport projects throughout their life cycles, including design, construction, maintenance and of course, also governance. We are also determined to reduce the carbon footprint of transport by promoting cleaner mobility alternatives such as public transport. There are ample opportunities to develop climate smart transport projects that reduce the sector's contribution to climate change while becoming more resilient to it. A good example is the [Unintelligible] Metro, which started operating a few months ago. The new metro will save hundreds of thousands of greenhouse gas emissions while bringing 780,000 jobs within the reach of commuters. Financing this transformation require multifaceted partnerships. As emphasized in our evolution roadmap, the World Bank is putting greater focus on leveraging our balance sheet to catalyze action and financing from more partners. Public private partnerships and financial innovations will be crucial in boosting investment in sustainable transport. The World Bank's global road safety facility and the global facility to decarbonize transport are at the leading edge of these efforts. In closing, I want to encourage all of you to focus your efforts this week on generating new ideas for transforming transportation into a resilient, sustainable force for development. I have no doubt that our collective expertise will lead to practical solutions that make a real difference. Have a great conference and thank you.
[Femi Oke] Our next plenary is Resilient Transport in Challenging Times. You will need an interpretation device or you may need one for this session. I am making a public service announcement for the Preston auditorium. We have lost three interpretation devices. They are worth a lot of money. I'm in trouble. If you have one in your bag, or you took one to another room, or you accidentally took it home, come to me. Chatham House rules. I will not tell anybody that you took it. Just bring it back. That would be great. Thank you. I know it's easy to do, but if it ended up somewhere else, on a desk somewhere, retrace your steps, bring it back. And of course, at the end of this session, please do not take the interpretation devices out of this room. Now I'm going to stop being the headmistress and introduce this next session and the speakers in the session, Dr. Sissy Nikolaou. Hello. Please join us on the stage. The very far chair is the group leader at the US National Institute of Technology and Standards. Christine Ghalechyan is Deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure of the Republic of Armenia. Welcome. Maria Constanza Garcia Alicastro is the Deputy Minister of Infrastructure at the Ministry of Transport in Colombia. Please take a seat. Dr. Siti Maimunah, welcome. Good morning. Please take a seat. Head of center of Transportation Infrastructure Financing, Indonesian Ministry of Transportation and Maria Louisa Dominguez is Strategic Plans and Projects Director and Advisor to the board of the IDF and President of EIM in Spain. Thank you so much, speakers. Looking forward to the conversation and our keynote will be presented by Dr. Juergen Voegele, who is the vice president of the World Bank. Welcome.
[Juergen Voegele] Thank you everyone. Good morning. To those of you online. I left my speech on my chair because it overlaps the 90% with what you've heard from a very comprehensive presentation by Victoria. I think it's clear what the challenge is. I think it's also clear, more clear in transport than in many other sectors, what the opportunities are. It's in front of us. It's not that we have to reinvent it. We know what the future transport that is, low carbon, low impact, really works for the people can look like. And we are on a journey to get there. I think the key challenge for us is to do it faster. That is what's really concerning. I be really feeling now everyone in this room and everyone around the world is feeling climate is changing faster than even the most conservative scientists predicted and projected. It's happening around us at a speed that we did not anticipate. And it's going to get worse fast. That's clearly where we are. And infrastructure is being impacted to a massive extent. We know the damages are huge already. It's in the mega billions and it's going to get accelerated. We will not be able, the way things look like, to keep this planet's temperature increase below 1.5 degrees.
[Juan Carlos Muñoz] This is a reality that we are facing. Last year was already at 1.5 above preindustrial times. It's an illusion to think, even if we do everything different and look at the politics around the world, how likely is that going to happen? It will be very, very challenging to stay below two degrees. At two degrees, all bets are off what the implications are for a sector like transport, with its massive infrastructure that's been built up over many, many decades. So we need to find a way to get to speed and we need to get to scale and we need to get to impact. This has been said before, I know, but I think the urgency and the clarity that's in front of us is just striking. We need to do things differently. So I want to build a little bit on what the previous panel sort of articulated. I think it was the minister from Chile and the minister from Lesotho. We kind of know what to do, but we are too slow. We're not getting there. And what we really need to do is get out of our silo, because it isn't just about the transport silo and the transport folks. It's connected to everything else that's going on around us. You can't have sustainable transport without that electricity. One of you made the point, and that electricity cannot be based on fossil fuels going forward over time, so we need to work together on that aspect. It is the food security challenge that many countries are facing. You cannot have food security without logistics and without infrastructure. It's been said before, but I think it's very, very important to really understand and analyze, country by country, how the scenario around us is changing and shifting. I spoke at a similar event a couple of weeks ago with relation to water. As a result of the changing climate, we now understand that our planet is drying up. It is not only groundwater recession, it is not only that the intensity of the storms, floods and droughts are going up, the planet itself, the soil moisture on the planet, is 15% lower today than it was in the past few decades, and it's going in the wrong direction. So everything a country does in water isn't a project, or isn't just another study, or isn't just another investment. Everyone has to fundamentally take a step or two back and rethink the way you manage your water going forward. What do you need to prioritize? Which is the topic of the day, because funding is limited, as we all know. You got to find a clear way how you prioritize and your assumptions that you carried with you for a long time, and I'm sure that's the same in transport, no longer necessarily hold. You have to rethink it. You have to take a step back and say, okay, in the next 20 or 30 years, that's what I'm going to face. Therefore, the infrastructure in this place will be more important than we thought ten years ago. So these kind of analytics and studies are absolutely fundamental, and they need to be done in every sector, and they need to be done jointly, not individually, separately, and then comparing notes, and then realizing, actually, we're talking past each other. This is true in countries. And thank you, minister, for making this clear. It's also true in here, in this institution, in the World Bank, and I think in many other institutions as well. So Guangzhe and I, we speak regularly in the intersection of climate, water, energy, all the other factors that impact infrastructure broadly, and particularly transport as well. Is it really that expensive to do this right? Actually, maybe not. Our study have shown that to make infrastructure, and particularly transport more resilient, is in the range of one to 5% of the cost. It's not twice, it's not double, it's not completely unreasonable if it's done deliberately and if the analytics are clear. Why is it still not happening? Because we don't really have the data in many parts of the world to understand what it takes, what the costs are, what is the priority. So this is a really important part of prioritization to get clearer what is more at risk, what is more likely to be achieved, where is it more cost effective to do so? These sorts of things are really important. There is technical capacity issues in countries. That is also the case, but it's not, I don't think, the major constraint. And then the question is, why doesn't the private sector do more of it? And again, this is because they're not clear what the real benefits are of a more resilient road, for instance, But it's also harder to sell something, even if it's 5% more expensive, it's harder to get the money for it. So there is this dynamic as well that we really need to understand. So going forward, I really believe we need to get to scale and to impact. And these are not just words. So for all of us in this room and for everyone who works in development, and we are very hard on ourselves internally right now to not just do yet another pilot, or to not just replicate something that did really well, but actually only reaches a fraction of the people that you could reach if you would have done something different. I think that we need to be very deliberate to understand, are we reaching a maximum number of people? If we invest a billion dollars, do we get the maximum impact on resilience? And we haven't done this. We are not doing it systematically. We're doing it now more in agriculture, for instance, food security, we're doing it more in water. And I just encourage all of you in transport and in that sector to just be really hard on yourself and say, “Okay, if I had five things I could do, what would they be and why?” And then put serious money behind it and get the political economy that's always between us, and speed and scale and success and impact, get that up to the level of the minister or above, get it into the president's office, et cetera, and push it and move it. And we've seen quite a number of very successful cases, and I'm sure the panelists here will share with us in this next session some of the successes, because nothing is better than when someone in one country says, “You know, we had massive issues, but you know what we did, that actually worked and you know why it worked and you know why we cut through the political economy and you know how we did the financing package.” Nothing is more powerful than that. So the more we hear of good examples, of course, also those that failed, they need to be shared. There's no doubt about that. But the most powerful one is one where you say nobody believed it was possible, but you know what? It happened and this is how it happened. And that's what learning is all about. So I wish everyone like Axel earlier, great week, great success, and I hope we can get to a world where our infrastructure is safe, because that's the foundation for every growth, all the future, for all of us. So thank you.
[Femi Oke] Thank you for starting off this plenary looking at resilient transport in challenging times. I'm going to ask you speakers about the challenging times and why your transport needs to be resilient by sharing examples with us. Christine showed me boulders on a highway yesterday. She's like, “See? This is happening right now. This is what I have to deal with.” Christine, will you explain for our audience, for you in Armenia, why there are boulders coming down onto the roads and why that is a good example of resilience and what you're having to do about that.
[Christine Ghalechyan] Thank you. Actually, it's happening even today morning. So it's happening every day in our transport, in our infrastructure, in main highways. And we acknowledge and following the monitoring temperature increase. We found out that Armenia overall is sensitive to natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, rock poles, happening with us very frequently. And this is alarming us to understand the full impact of climate change and our focus shifting from reactive responses to proactive mitigation measures in order to identify the sensitive parts through the network and do the investment, prioritize investment in transport sector. Our good example is collaboration with World Bank. We're mapping the climate and disaster hazards with the section in a road network. And now we decided to extend this exercise including whole country, entire country. And we're starting with risk assessment and preparation of investment strategy to mitigate this risk. Because Armenia is very dependent on transportation, so major part of transportation, 80% of transportation through the roads, because we have locked past here on the rails. And our economy and life very much depends for major part of regions, the roads are life line roads for the people. So we're very vulnerable and we will continue our efforts on this direction.
[Femi Oke] I love the way you said reactive, proactive. Because you nodded. That was a definite “I get that.” Why did you nod? Articulate the nod.
[Siti Maimunah] Okay, thank you, Femi. Good morning, everyone. Okay, that's related to the transportation resilience in Indonesia also. Indonesia is one of the vulnerable country due to the climate change, flooding and so on. But also in Indonesia, the most problem actually now is in the urban area, especially in the big cities in Indonesia, such as Jakarta, is the traffic jam, traffic congestion. This is very costly. And because of this, one of the government priority for this one to more proactive is how we to provide the public transportation more and more. Not in term of the quantity, but also in term of the quality. The quality. It means for the sustainable transportation. Sustainable, we call sustainable transportation, it means for the safety and also more green transportation. But how to provide this one is also not as easy, because developing the transportation infrastructure, we need a lot of money for sure how to finance this one. And then how to accelerate for this kind of the provision for sure to accelerate the transportation infrastructure in Indonesia. We try to get more investment. So in Indonesia, especially for me. For me, I'm in task of the center for the transportation infrastructure financing. It means we try to get more investment how to accelerate the development of transportation infrastructure. So this one not only from the local investment, but also from the abroad foreign investment. This is one of the priority we call Indonesia. This one with the creative financing. How to create the creative financing to accelerate the development of the transportation infrastructure, more green, more environmental friendly. And also we call this one with not the income of the criteria financing. Inside we have the green financing, because we also think about the sustainable of the transportation. I think this one of the big things of the Indonesia we face on currently in the big cities in Indonesia, because Indonesia is more developed in many areas in Indonesia, not only in Jakarta, many big cities in Indonesia. And also we try to more resilience for the climate change issue. Thank you, Femi.
[Femi Oke] Sissy, in your line of work, resilience means what? What preparation are you doing for resilience in transport? Explain with an example, if you would.
[Aspasia (Sissy) Nikolaou] Sure. I think resilience means different things to each person here. So for what we call lifelines or distributed networks like transportation, resilience has many components, one of which is redundancy. So what we have seen after extreme events, and I can talk about a very recent earthquake that happened in Japan a couple of months ago, and the devastating earthquake in Turkey last year, all the effects became much worse because of climate conditions. What we saw is that there was flow of traffic because there was partial ability of the highway network systems to work or not work, and this is where problems appeared. So a resilient network for transportation is a network that could at least provide key functions to operate, because eventually transportation serves the community. So you may have a perfect hospital after a flood, but if you cannot get to it, then you don't have a resilient community. So, going back to our keynote, I think that to build resilience infrastructure, you need to get out of— Each one of us— I come from the engineering side, right? Each one of us has to get out of our comfort zone and see what we need to get to a goal, to a resilient community. So this comes together with how you finance it, but also how you explain in different ways why we should invest in this and how much and when and into what stages.
[Femi Oke] What has worked from you, from that perspective? So you're kind of laying out, this is how you do it, what has worked. I like the way that Juergen, he kind of gave us a challenge. Don't keep talking about how hard it is. Tell us how you did it.
[Christine Ghalechyan] Right. So the way to do it is to change your mindset once you're designing or retrofitting or planning. So typically what we do is we say, “Oh, this is the flag that I expect that gives a force on the system, and I will design for it.” Now we need to think more big picture and go from that mindset to having decision support system. So we should be able to understand the network where we have the tools, what are the traffic conditions and what could happen to this network, and have sophisticated tools that we are developing that can give us, what are the risk in terms of not just physical losses and not just money losses, but also delays, interdependencies, exposure to cascading events, and find optimal solutions for questions like, “I have x amount of money for a year, what is the best way to invest it now, considering also climate effects,” or “I want to maximize the efficiency of the network, how much money do I need and for how long in order to achieve that?” So it is also a stakeholder and a decision maker conversation for the technocrats to be able to apply that. So in the United States, we have a trillion-dollar funding for infrastructure. Like one third of it goes to transportation. If we go and we dump all this money the same way we were doing it before, we are losing the race against time. We need to invest wisely and invest it with specific goals that can change over time and should follow the lifecycle of these assets. Because a lot of them are aged. We are not all going and building new highways, especially in this country. But I'm sure around the world we need to use what we have. Yeah.
[Christine Ghalechyan] Fully agree with this statement of changing mindset. It's true. And what we do with it. We understand that we need a new generation of civil engineers and of experts critical knowledge of climate resilience. And our academic partnership with Oxford Infrastructure and Analytics and our national University of Architecture and Construction aims to promote this knowledge. And we trying to invest in this to changing mentality, not only within governmental authorities, but also creating the new strategies and the investment planning, but also to be well prepared in a sense of changing mentality and our attention and our reaction on climate change, because the situation really climate change issues are more fastened than we expecting.
[Femi Oke] María Luisa, go ahead, what's on your mind?
[María Luisa Dominguez] Thank you very much and thank you for having me here because I represent the railway sector specifically in Spain. I totally agree with what you said, because I think in the last years, it's so clear how climate change is affecting our transport infrastructure, that I think new civil engineers, for sure, they will have to take it into account with the new designs, but not only with the new designs. I think maybe the most important are the existing infrastructures and how it is affecting, because in the railway system, most of the conventional lines were built at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. So the circumstances and the climate events are so different that for sure we have to be much better prepared or differently prepared, as you said. So let me explain a little bit about Spain. In Spain, the climate change is affecting us very much. We are having much hotter summers than before. And speaking about heat waves, maybe just ten years ago, you could speak about, okay, a couple of heat waves in the summer. That meant twice, for three, four days, maybe 40 degrees on the south of the country. Last summer, media spoke about six, seven waves. Personally, I think we only had one wave which started at the beginning of July and finished almost at the end of August and with temperatures over 40 degrees, not in the south of the country, in the north of the country. So the risk of fires and the kind of fires we are having is quite high. And also firefighters, they realize that they need different ways of fighting against these kind of fires, but at the same time we are having severe flooding, more frequent and overall in different places than before. The minister from Chile, he said that they had an extraordinary flood and he said the biggest in the last hundred years, but who knows if it's going to repeat in a couple of years. So it's very difficult because all the data we used to have before now maybe are not useful. This is the big disadvantage. I think we, at the same time have a big advantage. It's technology. Now, how can we deal with data? So what we are doing in Spain is taking all those data and having all the information we get from the existing network and assessing this data so we can prevent where the most exposed points are and so act on them. And also, I think it's quite important not only to plan it, but to collaborate with all shareholders and stakeholders. Some examples we have developed in Spain, for example, collaborating with landowners on both sides of the track and agree with them, in some cases to plant trees, for example, just to retain the terrain to run, in other cases, sometimes using herbicides to avoid having some vegetation on both sides with the risk of strong fires. So I think collaborating, cooperating with them is quite interesting. And what we are trying to do, well, we have already done with the high speed network, which is more modern, and so we already have a risk map, and it's incorporated in the risk map of the whole company. I mean, the risk map for climate change. And now we are doing the same with conventional lines, and we are planning to have it finished by 2030.
[Femi Oke] Maria Luisa, can I just take you one step back, because I was in Europe last summer, and I remember the weather maps. You know, the deep orange color is when it's super-hot. And basically the whole of Spain, a big chunk of Europe, which is the deep burnt orange color. What does that do to the railways in Spain?
[María Luisa Dominguez] Well, the advantage of railways is that it is mean of transport, more people, more goods. But if it is affected, it affects to more people, more goods. That's why we have to pay attention, and not only, as you said before, not only to act afterwards, we have to try to prevent. That's why we are doing this map, risk map, because if you know where the most critical points are, you can act on them before that happens. Or maybe it happens once, but avoid to have it twice. For example, last September, there was a very strong storm in an area on south of Madrid, and it affected to all infrastructures, I mean, roads and railways, and for the first time, it affected the high speed railway. But the advantage we had was that in some hours, the high speed line could again work and railways went back to service before roads. I think that's the advantage of railways in these cases.
[Femi Oke] I see your questions. I need to get some insights from Colombia. First of all, from Maria Constanza and I'll come right back to your questions. Maria Constanza, our entire reason for being here over the past two days has been mobilizing finance for climate action. In Colombia, when you're looking at resilience in the transport system, where is that investment coming from?
[Maria Constanza Garcia Alicastro] Before I talk about investment, allow me to share about a situation in Colombia today. This is not very different from the examples you have shared. Colombia has high vulnerability. I was thinking right now, and I was remembering in January, last January, we had an avalanche, 39 deaths with this event. During the La Nina phenomenon, we had over 4700 infrastructure emergencies. So when we are asked, what are the priorities for the Colombian government, if we have five priorities, one of them today is to adapt our infrastructure to climate change. How to make infrastructure resilient, because we cannot invest in infrastructure if we cannot guarantee that 365 days of the year that infrastructure will be available. As we've said before, infrastructure means development. The economy is based on our infrastructure. And we have a paradigm here. What has Colombia done? And this is a path we've followed hand in hand with the World Bank and the IDB. We've thought of a new design paradigm. For years, we've talked about green guidelines in design from conception, from feasibility studies. And design. Infrastructure has to answer, taking into account these climate events, which are increasingly frequent and intense. As was said before, maybe this is more costly at the beginning, maybe it is more expensive If we just look at this, simply considering the CapEx for this type of project. But certainly when we do a comprehensive assessment, and if we think about risks, and if those risks materialize, we can have a very positive cost benefit ratio. What decisions has the Colombian government taken? Well, we have implemented new design paradigms. This is not an option. Infrastructure has to be thought of in such a way that it is resilient. As I said before yesterday at a different session, characteristics of Colombia are quite specific. We have a mountain rage where we see most of the disasters and events. Funding is a challenge, of course, in a country that today still needs to improve connectivity conditions. A country that wishes to reactivate its modes of transport, a country where we see serious needs visa vis urban passenger transport. But we need to find that financing the national government with green funds and everything that is available today through investment banking, so that no matter what, we can adapt our infrastructure. In our case, this is an urgent need so as to be able to save lives. And allow me to add something else with this resilience exercise. There is another important concept. Yesterday we talked about road safety. This is another priority. When we mentioned the five priorities for Colombia, saving lives is one of them. And infrastructure also plays a role. And I believe there is a very significant concept. It's this forgiving infrastructure. How can we think of this urban infrastructure, resilient infrastructure, infrastructure that will forgive the mistakes we make when we move throughout the city so as to cut down on the number of fatalities on the road. This is something that we are working towards and we need to prioritize this. It's been five years that we have been working to understand the location of the emergencies with heat maps so as to prioritize our investments, working also with academia, with new generations of engineers, with training of engineers, so that all of these elements to consider risk do not take us to linear designs. It's not about that anymore. 30 meters here, 30 meters there. We need to understand the permeability of a road and guaranteeing that permeability so that the infrastructure can truly be adapted to the effects of climate change today with these increasingly intense events that put at risk not only infrastructure, but also human life.
[Femi Oke] To do my best to preserve your breaks, I'm going to ask if you would do a brief question and very brief responses from our speakers. Thanks for your patience. Go ahead.
[Audience Member 4] Thank you. Jeremy Anderson from the International Transport Workers Federation. And as we represent 20 million transport workers globally, my question to the panel is, are you including planning for workforce resilience and financing for workforce resilience in your resilience planning? Because transport workers are facing many resilience challenges, from heat stress to loss of income, like we saw the extreme economic hardship, for example, in Pakistan after the floods, to the rail sector. And we heard earlier from Juergen about the need for urgency. We can't move anywhere if we don't have the workers on board.
[Femi Oke] That is a really good question. I'm going to ask. Let me just think, who is from governments here. Christine, very briefly, are you thinking about workers in your resilience planning?
[Christine Ghalechyan] It's continuing efforts in this regard relating to improving capacity overall in a transfer sector, not only as well as for the workers as well. So many trainings and programs developing by our ministry in collaboration with IFIs to be well prepared and have this expanded knowledge for the workers as well. So we have specific requirements under civil work contracts that need to prepare also the workers.
[Femi Oke] Let's get a perspective from Indonesia. Mai, is this a new idea or are you already thinking about workers?
[Siti Maimunah] Yes, I think this is similar to Christine, that in Indonesia we also have the special training for the workers and also in terms of the climate issue and so on. I think we are thinking for the workers also. So we have to prepare for that one. Yeah.
[Femi Oke] Maria Louisa.
[María Luisa Dominguez] If you let me about railways, these high temperatures in summer, that has made us to reschedule our works, because in general, summer was a great period for for civil works, truck works. But now with these extreme temperatures, thinking about our staff, we have to reschedule a lot of work. So, yes, we necessarily need to think about them.
[Femi Oke] There's more, Christine?
[Christine Ghalechyan] The major programs, infrastructure projects coming with health and safety, specific programs that have to cover all this risk and provide the measures, that's something mandatory. The contractors and employers, everyone have to follow that.
[Femi Oke] That is such a good question. That question is a 30-minute panel, right? Yeah. Next year. Can we remember that in that little survey that comes out at the end of the conference? Will you put that in? Because it's such an important point that you made, and we're not doing it justice, but I would love to do a worker's plenary. All right, action that.
[Audience Member 5] I'm also Devon from the International Union of Railways. So the question was a little bit for the keynote. He said we didn't really expect that the climate change effect will be so harsh. I a little bit wonder who is we? Because a lot of people expected that the effect of climate change will be as harsh as it is today. Perhaps not some people in World Bank, I don't know. But my question is now for the panel. Do you think you will have enough money? Because we didn't have enough money to really struggle against carbon emission. It's basically a failure. Do you think you will have enough money for doing the resilience? Thank you.
[Femi Oke] All right, I'm going to— Thank you. Thank you very much. I am going to make this a one sentence answer, because your one sentence is standard between refreshments and conversation and the break. All right, I have the first volunteer. Please go ahead, María Constanza
[Maria Constanza Garcia Alicastro] I believe it is very important to think in terms of priorities and understand what it is we are facing. When we talk about climate change and resilience, we're thinking about lives. This is not just about improving a service or improving quality or having greater connectivity. We are truly talking, and this is the case of Colombia. Each emergency can mean loss of life, human life. When we try to incorporate these elements, we face certain issues. If we design a bridge with resilience parameters, with green guidelines, this infrastructure will have a longer life.
[Femi Oke] Just to get to the heart of that question, in a sentence so we can wrap up our plenary. Will you have— Do you have enough money? [Maria Constanza Garcia Alicastro] We have to find it. The investment cannot be cut. We need to find the money. [Femi Oke] I like that positivity. Christine, your sentence. [Christine Ghalechyan] Sorry, no, I've not to respond. I just want to ask another question. I'm not in the liberty. [Femi Oke] Christine. It's a one sentence. If you're going to ask, because we are wrapping up. All right, your final sentence. You're leaving us with what? [Christine Ghalechyan] Yeah, I would like to ask about how technologies and data analytics supporting climate related changes for the countries and if they have some small experience to share. [Femi Oke] All right, very good. This is our coffee break conversation. Sissy, go ahead.
[Aspasia (Sissy) Nikolaou] Yeah, I don't think anybody has enough money. But the money that we have, we need to spend them wiser and spend them gradually and with priorities, of course, of life safety, but also of life quality. Getting indicators that relate to how much our design and solutions contribute to reducing climate change impacts on that infrastructure. And that way our money is going to pay off a lot more while we are trying to solicit more and actually bring success cases to make the case for bringing more money. [Femi Oke] Got it. Mai?
[Siti Maimunah] Do we have money? For sure not enough. The money. I think this almost all have the similar anger. But how we come up with this one? Yes. How to accelerate the development of the infrastructure and so on. At the beginning we are already involved about the rethinking, about the resilience. So it can be little bit costly, as the keynote also already mentioned. But I think it's this more sustainable and then in the long term this can be cheaper. So from where the money is, from the investment from you, from all over the world. [Femi Oke] Maria Louisa, you have the final word? Yes.
[María Luisa Dominguez] Now let me, instead of speaking in the name of a Spanish [Renaissance] Infrastructure Manager speaking in the name of all European infrastructure managers and give you some information. The European Union published a report on climate change recently and they said that even though investments in critical sectors, among them is transport, have increased in the last years, for example, in 2022 it reached €407,000,000,000. They say we need still to double and they calculate more or less €813,000,000,000 per year to adapt our infrastructures to make them more resilient.
[Femi Oke] Thank you so much. We have started a conversation. We will continue it the rest of TT 2024. Plenary number four. Attendees, please thank them.
Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining, Malawi
Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, Harvard University and Former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia
@ClaudiaLopez
Center for International Development Senior Fellow, Harvard University and former Prime Minister, Cote d’Ivoire
@ACHIPatrick4
Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge, Inter-American Development Bank
@anamibanez
Member, NITI Aayog, and Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Director of Sustainable Finance, Industry, and Diplomacy, Bezos Earth Fund
@bodnarclimate
Partner, CEO of SouthBridge Investment
President, European Rail Infrastructure Managers (EIM)
Group Leader, National Institute of Technology and Standards, USA
Minister of Transport and Highways and Minister of Mass Media, Sri Lanka
Minister of Public Works and Communications, Paraguay
Deputy Minister of Transport, Armenia
Viceminister of Infrastructure, Colombia
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