The 85th plenary session of ITC
The UNECE Inland Transport Committee (ITC) is celebrating its 85th plenary session this week (21 to 24 February 2023) in Geneva, under the general theme: “Actions of the inland transport sector to join the global fight against climate change”.
This theme provide an opportunity to reflect on the unique assets of the Committee, highlighting its value added and underlining its future potential in curbing greenhouse gas emissions trends from inland transport in a disaster-hit global economy due to the impacts of climate change regionally and globally.
Yesterday (21 February 2023) the plenary session, in in-person format, was inaugurated with opening statements and keynote speeches on the importance of addressing climate change challenges, harnessing the full potential of inland transport solutions and the role of the Committee as a catalyst for action and delivery.
The opening was followed by three consecutive Ministerial panels on:
1. Critical partnerships and leaving no-one behind in the climate battle: global challenges and winning formulas for net-zero leaders;
2. Bridging regulators and innovators to bring to scale critical technologies supporting climate change mitigation actions;
3. A bet we can’t afford to lose: challenges and opportunities in the nexus of international financial and regulatory support for climate action.
Represented by its President Mr. Müller, the Executive Director Mr. Fernández and Mr. Nolte member of the Bureau Permanent, CITA actively participated in the second panel held in the afternoon.
“Ensuring life time compliance of any kind of vehicles, no matter if we talk about vehicles with combustion engines, hybrid vehicles or pure electric vehicles, is crucial to keep the environmental performance on a high level. With the regulation about On Board Fuel Consumption Measurement, PTI operators are collecting data regarding the real consumption of vehicles. These operators, which are either authorities or legally authorized companies, must have access to relevant vehicle data. Only with original vehicle data in combination with additional tests the status of a vehicle can be assessed meaningfully. Therefore it´s absolutely necessary that legislators elaborate binding requirements for the car industry to allow vehicle inspection operators tp get access to safety and emission relevant data. These data must be for free, because vehicle inspection is a legal task and data can only be used for this specific purpose” declared Mr. Müller.
The conference ended with the endorsement of the Ministerial Declaration on “Harnessing the full potential of inland transport solutions in the global fight against climate change”.
This declaration will give direction to the work of ITC as the United Nations platform for inland transport to deliver on climate change solutions and accelerate the transition to decarbonized mobility and net zero or low emissions in the inland transport sector.
In the declaration, ministers and heads of delegations from all UN regions request the ITC secretariat to develop a strategy document on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in inland transport based on international United Nations legal instruments under its purview and to present it at the annual session next year.