How Pacific Countries are Developing Low-Carbon Transport

The Pacific region faces mixed challenges that complicate transport planning. Extreme climate events threaten infrastructure, while remoteness and small market sizes limit potential investments. Countries also depend heavily on international shipping and aviation and rely on imported technologies and fuel. Rapid rural to urban migration places additional pressure on public services, while rapidly evolving digital and technological systems can be difficult to adopt at small scale. Geopolitical shifts further reshape trade routes and partnerships.

With challenges interacting and cascading in complex ways, a long-term planning approach is essential to ensure that today’s decisions remain viable and resilient in the future. Traditional short- to medium-term planning practices can lead to undesirable outcomes, including increased vulnerability to disasters, oversight of important risks, and failure to seize new opportunities.

To address their challenges, the Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands governments partnered with the Asian Development Bank to explore possible transport futures and develop long-term, low-carbon transport sector pipelines, while building foresight capacity.

The project used three in-country workshops:

Workshop 1: Futures-thinking and foresight workshop
The first workshop introduced key foresight concepts and practices, built futures literacy among participants, and reviewed each country’s Future Transport Demand and Trend Reports developed prior to the workshops.

Workshop 2: Scenario planning and visioning process workshop
Participants identified and evaluated 32 critical uncertainties—trends or variables whose future direction is unpredictable but could strongly shape transport outcomes. Two priority uncertainties were selected for each country and placed in a 2×2 scenario matrix, generating four plausible combinations of “high” and “low” states. Participants developed detailed transport scenarios for each quadrant.

Papua New Guinea identified energy security and land availability, while Solomon Islands identified advanced transport technologies and geopolitical instability as priority uncertainties for planning their transport futures.

To support the scenario development process, several experts shared insights on how their technologies might evolve during the period and help address transport challenges.^[1] Some participants also presented future narratives—stories describing plausible transport futures for each country in 2050. These narratives helped shift thinking beyond present-day and supported the visioning exercises that ultimately helped each country develop its 2050 vision statement.

Workshop 3: Backcasting and road mapping workshops
This workshop connected long-term visions with near-term strategic planning, grounded in each country’s current realities and national aspirations. Participants refined the 2050 vision statement and identified transport initiatives designed to respond to their specific challenges. Samples of these initiatives included:

• Papua New Guinea: vehicle and drone inspections for road network maintenance, solar-electric passenger ferries, drones for goods and service delivery, and a digital ID and integrated payment system.
• Solomon Islands: solar-powered tram along the arterial corridor, solar-electric taxi canoes, phased replacement of aging and unsafe vessels with new, energy-efficient vessels, and electric short-hop aircraft for the Munda hub.

Through backcasting, participants mapped milestones, enabling conditions, and activities required to realize each selected initiative by 2050.

Papua New Guinea critical uncertainties analysis
Assessing critical uncertainties helps the government and stakeholders seize opportunities and navigate risks effectively. Participants identified 32 critical uncertainties (Figure 1) during the workshop.

Figure 1: Critical Uncertainties for Papua New Guinea’s Transport Sector

Participants then evaluated each critical uncertainty for both its level uncertainty and impact, placing them on a scale. Those in the top right quadrant—highly uncertain and high impact—were identified as the primary focus. The results of the assessments are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Critical Uncertainty Analysis Results

Note: Purple critical uncertainties were added by participants during the workshop. After the workshop, the project team consolidated overlapping items, resulting in the 32 critical uncertainties shown in Figure 1.

Solomon Islands transport roadmap 
A roadmap toward Solomon Islands’ Vision for Transport 2050 was developed. The roadmap is illustrated through five pathways that explore how several salient critical uncertainties ^[2] may influence the country’s transport options through 2050. The analysis highlights a “preferred pathway,” where all conditions align for steady progress toward the vision.^[3]

While the goal is to follow the preferred pathway, the roadmap recognizes that alternate routes may be necessary due to emerging risks or missed milestones.

One example is the Energy Bottleneck Pathway (Figure 3). In this scenario, the country’s development conditions are positive, but progress on renewable energy is slow. Despite the energy constraints, Solomon Islands continues by implementing the interventions outlined in Figure 3. Together, these measures sustain meaningful progress toward achieving the Vision for Transport 2050.

Figure 3: Energy Bottleneck Pathway—Example

Foresight approaches are flexible and can be adapted to different country contexts and sectors. They provide governments with tools to anticipate uncertainty, assess emerging technologies, and align transport planning with national priorities.

In the October 2025 regional workshop—drawing on the experiences of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, the foresight approaches were found to help decision-makers navigate complex challenges and design more resilient infrastructure. By embedding foresight into strategic planning, they were able to develop transport systems that are adaptive, inclusive, and future‑ready—not by rigidly following a fixed plan, but by effectively anticipating and responding to change. Building on these successes, applying foresight approaches in other Pacific countries could strengthen transport system resilience and support sustainable and inclusive growth.

Key lessons from the foresight process in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are:

• Include junior and mid-level officials. They are likely to be in decision-making positions 10–15 years. Their involvement ensures that foresight knowledge endures and improves strategic decision-making.
• Condense workshop timeline. The three in-country workshops were spread over 16 months, requiring refreshers for participants. Future applications should aim to complete all workshops within six months to ensure continuity and engagement.

^[1] Technology suppliers were Applus+, Navalt, NZAero, and Wellington Electric Boat Building Company.

^[2] These critical uncertainties were selected following their identification as central to the development of the country’s transport sector throughout the foresight workshops series.

^[3] The roadmap provides the overall strategic plan for how Solomon Islands can move toward its Vision for Transport in 2050. The pathways illustrate different possible routes the country might take, depending on how selected critical uncertainties evolve. It shows that the roadmap is non-linear, and each pathway explores how future conditions could shape transport choices. While the roadmap shows the overarching strategy, the pathways explore multiple plausible futures within that strategy.

Castalia, A. Kalliokoski, and R. Idei. Forthcoming. Critical Uncertainties for Papua New Guinea’s Transport Sector. ADB.

Castalia, A. Kalliokoski, and R. Idei. Forthcoming. Critical Uncertainties for Solomon Islands’ Transport Sector. ADB.

Castalia, A. Kalliokoski, and R. Idei. Forthcoming. Papua New Guinea Future Transport Demand and Trend Report. Asian Development Bank.

Castalia, A. Kalliokoski, and R. Idei. Forthcoming. Solomon Islands Future Transport Demand and Trend Report. ADB.