First UN Summit on Global Road Safety Approved


At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly attended by two BJD ISC members, the UN approved the first ever global conference on road safety, which will focus on reducing the rapidly growing death toll on the world's roads. The UN Conference, with participation at least at Ministerial level, will be held in Moscow next year. The decision by the UN General Assembly marks a major victory for the BJD Global Road Safety and the Make Roads Safe campaigns, which have advocated for such high-level focus on the issue since the start of the Decade. Please click here to read more:

During the General Assembly session, the UN heard that road deaths are now the number one killer of young people aged 10-24 worldwide. Overall, each year more than 1.2 million people are killed and 50 million injured. The latest forecasts show that unless action is taken, more than twenty million lives could be lost from 2000-2015, with a doubling of the annual death rate by 2030.

The Make Roads Safe campaign promotes a strong agenda for action at the UN Ministerial conference, including:
 * Call for the international community to fund, at minimum, a 10
 year, $300 million, action plan to increase road safety capacity in
 low and middle income countries;
 * To ensure that 10% of road infrastructure budgets funded by
 international donors should be earmarked for safety.

About the campaign
 Make Roads Safe is an international campaign to put global road traffic injuries on the G8 and UN sustainability agendas. Building on the work of the Commission for Global Road Safety, the Make Roads Safe campaign aims to raise public and political awareness of a global road traffic injury epidemic that kills at least 3000 people, and 500 children, every day.

Objectives
Recognition by the G8 and the international community that global road traffic injuries represent an urgent public health emergency and a major development challenge.

Action by the United Nations, G8 and major aid donors to:
 * Fund a global Action Plan to improve road safety in developing
 countries
 * Ensure that at least 10% of road budgets provided by the World
 Bank and other major lenders is devoted to road safety
 * Organise a UN summit to agree high level political commitment to action on global road traffic injuries

To read more about the BJD Global Road Safety Campaign, please see http://www.bjdonline.org/default.aspx?contId=241

And to read more about the Make Roads Safe Campaign, please see http://www.makeroadssafe.org/index.html