Passenger transport may be public, where operators provide scheduled services, or private. Freight transport has become focused on containerization, although bulk transport is used for large volumes of durable items. Transport plays an important part in economic growth and globalization, but most types cause air pollution and use large amounts of land. While it is heavily subsidized by governments, good planning of transport is essential to make traffic flow and restrain urban sprawl.

The United Nation's first formally recognized the role of transport in sustainable development in the 1992 United Nation's Earth summit. In the 2012 United Nation's World Conference, global leaders unanimously recognised that transport and mobility are central to achieving the sustainability targets. In recent years, data has been collected to show that the transport sector contributes to a quarter of the global greenhouse gas emissions and thus, sustainable transport has been mainstreamed across several of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially those related to food, security, health, energy, economic growth, infrastructure, and cities and human settlements. Meeting sustainable transport targets is said to be particularly important to achieving the Paris Agreement