Why Decarbonising Transport Is Never a Solo Journey

Five days trace one argument: decarbonising transport takes alliances, not single actors

Transport influences how quickly economies can shift onto a more sustainable path. It defines how people reach a job, a school, or a hospital. Yet it also produces a fifth of the world’s energy-related emissions, and that number is still growing.

A decade ago, the world agreed in Paris to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Since then, the science has been clear about what that requires: cutting global emissions by 43 percent by 2030, compared to 2019 levels. The transport system has the potential to close a meaningful part of that gap, but only through something simple to name and harder to build: trust to partner, shared evidence, and practical cooperation across very different national contexts.

Transport and Climate Change Week 2026 is built around that idea, and registration for its 9th edition is now open.

Partnering for Action

This year’s conference takes its motto from that same idea: Partnering for Action, Global Alliances and Opportunities for Decarbonising Transport. It will run fully online from 5 to 9 October, and for five days it puts leaders, practitioners, funders and private sector partners from across the world in the same virtual room. Rather than start with a welcome, it opens with a question:

As the world grows more complex and less predictable, how does cooperation itself need to change to foster better strategic capacity over responsive solutions?

Part of the answer is already taking shape. A decade of implementation experience has built up across the Global South, and that experience is starting to reshape what cooperation looks like: less a matter of advice flowing in one direction, more a conversation between peers who have each learned something the others need. That plays out through four lenses woven across the whole week: a global perspective on the pressures every country recognises, regional sessions that give the floor directly to partner countries, hearing from South East Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America in their own words, project practices grounded in GIZ’s own work on the ground, and side events shaped together with other organisations bringing their own angle into the room.

What to Expect

Across the week, four different kinds of session shape how the conversation unfolds, and each one offers something different to whoever joins.

• A global perspective opens the frame, setting out the pressures and trends every country recognises regardless of geography: a shared starting point no matter where you’re joining from
• A regional perspective narrows that frame, letting a specific part of the world speak in its own terms, with its own institutions and its own history of what has and has not worked
• Project practices go closer still, into the detail of what a specific initiative actually did: the decisions, the setbacks, the parts that held, for anyone looking for something closer to a blueprint than a big idea
• Side events carry the threads that don’t fit neatly inside the main agenda, giving focused topics a room of their own instead of a passing mention

The Arc of the Week

The programme itself follows that same logic across five days, building rather than repeating. It opens by asking how international cooperation needs to adapt to be effective and respond faster to a diversity of contexts, promoting long-term implementation in a less predictable world, laying the alliances that everything after depends on. From there it turns to evidence, partner countries sharing not theory, but what actually happened when they tried to build a partnership that steers transformation, and what it took to make it hold. By midweek, at the Symposium, the conversation sharpens into solutions that cross borders, pressing for more decisive climate action and asking where the investment will come from to move the sector toward net-zero. It then widens into scale, where action has to be implemented in regional territories and meet a longer-term vision if growth is going to stay green and just rather than fast at any cost. And it closes by looking forward, weighing what still stands between now and a transport sector that has actually changed. Midweek is also where political leadership joins the conversation, focused on what it takes to coordinate a sector that rarely sits inside a single ministry, from clean energy planning to city development to gender-inclusive design. It is where the global and regional threads meet directly: what a continental approach to electrification could mean for freight corridors that cross multiple countries, and what kind of collaboration lets countries move at their own pace while still moving together.

By the second half of the week, the question shifts again, from what works to what it takes to make it work everywhere. Electrifying freight fleets becomes the clearest example, a systemic effort where charging infrastructure, energy planning, financing and policy have to move together for a pilot to become a market. Running underneath it, a quieter thread touches everything else: the data and transparency that let countries track progress and hold their climate commitments, and each other, accountable. Regional experiences from Asia and Latin America close this part of the story, each showing that scaling impact takes time, and that it moves faster when it is shared rather than solved twice.

An Open Invitation

The week ends with a conversation, not a conclusion: a high-level panel looking a decade ahead, from deeper partnership with Europe to new pathways for investment and integrated climate action. By the time it closes, the week has moved through every level a partnership needs: global, regional, practical and political, without ever losing sight of the people at the other end of a decision made at a national ministry or a city hall.

That is the invitation Transport and Climate Change Week 2026 extends: not to watch the sector change, but to help build the alliances that will change it.

The Mobilize Net-Zero project team is organising the Transport and Climate Change Week, alternating between a virtual and face-to-face format. The project is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and is funded through the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUKN).