On April 25th, the United Nations’ “Road Safety and Digital Innovation Learning Conference” was successfully convened at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. The conference is jointly sponsored by Budweiser APAC and high-profile organizations including UNITAR, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Tongji University, the Shanghai World Cities Day Coordination Center and UNITAR CIFAL Shanghai. More than 80 government representatives, academic leaders and relevant stakeholders from Asia-Pacific countries and regions including China, South Korea, India and the Philippines gathered to deeply explore road safety-related issues and digital innovations that the region now confronts, in hopes of promoting safer roads and cutting causalities caused by road safety accidents.

Among them, Jan Craps, CEO of Budweiser APAC, noted: “The conference marks the first ever implementation of the Budweiser-UNITAR partnership, and helps us further deepen Budweiser APAC’s commitment towards improving road safety. By exchanging and sharing successful experiences and best practices on the global level, we hope to explore innovative and pragmatic solutions to effectively cut road traffic casualties and positively contribute to building safer roads in the Asia Pacific.”

Budweiser APAC joins forces with UNITAR to co-build exchange platform and expand governance mentalities

For now, road safety casualties have risen to become a safety challenge of global concern. According to UN Statistics, 1.35 million people die on the world’s roads every year, making road traffic accidents the 9th leading cause of death globally as well as the leading cause of death for economically active citizens aged 15-29. Attaching significance to the issue, the UN has initiated The Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, which seeks to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries by 50% by 2020.

Being a company with a high sense of social responsibility, Budweiser APAC has been actively responding to the UN’s call. To achieve road safety targets and curb momentum of rising accidents, we embraced a partnership with UNITAR to co-organize the Road Safety Learning Conference, which was clearly aimed at expanding mental horizons for road safety governance and co-building an effective road traffic safety improvement model by exchanging and sharing digital innovations and successful experiences from different countries.

At the conference, experts and scholars from different countries presented eye-opening advanced smart traffic safety solutions, and in particular, a range of digital innovative measures such as automated driving, intelligent moving, AI-based smart traffic lights and road safety big data, which all shed new lights on problem-solving mentalities towards existing road safety challenges.

Sangwon LEE, a road traffic safety instructor from South Korea, said that he gained a lot of inspirations from the learning conference: “Technology and digital innovation are key to improving road safety in cities. The conference helps us draw experiences from advanced digital solutions shared by the global think-tank, so that we can combine them with our local realities by learning from their strengths and overcoming our weaknesses, as we create localized smart road safety solutions.”

Estrella Merlos, deputy director of the CIFAL global network at the United Nations institute for training and research, praised the partnership with budweiser. In the future, we will continue to cooperate to improve the road safety management capacity of relevant departments through effective measures. We also hope that more socially responsible and forward-looking companies like budweiser will join us in the fight to improve road safety and save more lives."

Budweiser APAC commits to building safer roads, with its TSR Shanghai Pilot winning global recognition

For long, Budweiser APAC has spared no effort in realizing its vision for “safer roads”. Being a company with a high sense of social responsibility, we’ve been actively responding to the UN’s call. Back in 2015, we partnered with a fleet of world-leading private companies to launch the Together for Safer Roads coalition, seeking to co-contribute to road safety improvements and cutting casualties arising from road traffic accidents. Together with the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Traffic Police Brigade and academic institutions represented by Tongji University, the TSR Shanghai Pilot initiated by us turned out to be an exemplary multi-stakeholder mechanism that yielded positive results and effectively cut road traffic casualties with innovative programs such as “analysis and improvement of crash-prone roads” and “behavioral-analysis-based commercial drive safety education”.  And since 2008, we’ve been, for 11 years in a row, actively interacting with authorities and different sectors to advocate the no-drink-driving mentality across the country. Last year, we took a step further by expanding its road safety-related efforts to Tibet.

Gathering top minds to co-explore road safety, UN’s “Road Safety and Digital Innovation: Learning Conference” is successfully convened in Shanghai