Summit on Road Safety to Adopt Decade of Action

The first ever Global Ministerial Summit on Road Safety will meet this week in Moscow, after it received the UN approval back in April 2008. The summit's main goal is to create the framework required for participating countries to reduce the number of road casualties around the world.

The act to be adopted, the so called Decade of Action, is based on the grim predictions made about the number of people expected to loose their lives on the world's roads in the following years.

According to those predictions, by 2030 the projected number of deaths will be double the size of the one recorded today, just-auto.com reported. This year alone, 1.3 million people have or will die on the roads, with about 90 percent of them coming from poor countries. Furthermore, the primary cause of death for young people, aged between 15 and 19, is represented by car accidents in developing countries.

The Decade of Action calls for a ten point plan combining political commitment, international donor support for infrastructure development, and sustained national prioritization of road injury prevention with the goal of reducing the number of projected deaths by at least 50 percent by 2020.

The initiative is supported even by the FIA, who is lobbying for the adoption of the document.

"Five million lives are at stake in the coming decade. We know what needs to be done to save these lives.  The international community must demonstrate their political will to succeed, and make this ministerial meeting a turning point for global road safety," Jean Todt, FIA president said.