WBCSD 'Pathways to Sustainable Mobility' Report

WBCSD on Mobility 2030: International Peer Review

Peer Review & Recommendations

From the WBCSD

More background

World Business Council - Mobility 2030 report

On 5 July 2004 the World Business Council for Sustainable Development released an extensive and much publicized report crowning more than four years of work by some two hundred participants under the title "Mobility 2030: Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability". The report was developed by twelve leading global automotive and energy companies working under the aegis of the WBCSD to assess the sustainability of their products and to envision the future of mobility, with special focus on road transport.

"Mobility 2030" was given extensive media coverage and publicly greeted as a significant contribution to thinking about sustainable mobility by some of the more important international industry and energy agencies and associations. According to GM's Executive Vice President Tom Gottschalk, a project co-chair, the report is intended to be a catalyst. "The challenges to sustaining mobility are significant," he said, "but they can be met over time, provided society supports constructive approaches and solutions and encourages real understanding and cooperation among stakeholders." He added, "This report contributes positively toward that goal."

Our more critical position - and proposal

Our own reading of the report -- as well as our continuing attention to the process behind over the last several years -- was more troubling. We saw it as a potential diversion from the sense of high urgency that in our view is the only responsible reaction to the issues under review, and that one of the main dangers is that by its tone and focus the report serves to downplay the need for high priority near term remedial actions on many fronts. It was not that the report is not a useful and interesting read, for it certainly is. The problem however lies in that sub-title "Meeting the Challenges of Sustainability", a promise which is not (yet) kept.

The sponsors and authors of Mobility 2030 invite further "contributions from every part of the society throughout the world" to help in "engaging societies effectively around sustainable mobility issues". We are pleased to respond to this invitation with a strong positive attitude that will help all involved to start to become "part of the solution".

For these reasons we got together with several hundred of our international colleagues who represent some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the world sustainability and transport movements, to consider together what the report meant and what we should be trying to do with it. You will find the results of this process (just getting underway in late July) in these pages.

You will also in due course find our point by point recommendations both for the WBCSD team and others directly concerned with the in-process emergency -- those are our words -- that our cities, people and planet are facing today as a result of the egregious unsustainability of our present transportation arrangements. Arrangements which, as the report neglects to put into the front line, for which extensive rethinking and ground-up restructuring is both possible and necessary. Without delay.

* Click to go to Organization of the Review