Reducing Transport-Related Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Developing Countries: The Role of the Global Environmental Facility

Publisher Summary Transportation is the fastest-growing sector of greenhouse gas emissions globally. The Global Environmental Facility (GEF)—managed jointly by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)—is increasingly important as a source of financing sustainable transportation projects around the world. After some initial missteps, the GEF is playing an increasingly constructive role in bringing about the sort of dramatic shift in transport paradigm that will be required to avert significant global warming. In the late 1990s, the GEF decided to make transportation a specific operational program and began to draft Operational Program #11 (OP#11). Critics of the hydrogen fuel cell technology approach of the first GEF projects focused on several areas of concern. GEF funds are increasingly playing a vital role in helping both the UNDP and the World Bank in being more proactive in generating good projects rather than just waiting for good projects to come to them. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems include various integrated improvements that increase the speed, capacity, and quality of bus-based transit services. The main point of BRT is to create an integrated mass transit system that has the quality of service and performance that can be achieved only at a much higher price by rail-based systems.