Insurgentes Avenue runs 18 miles across Mexico City. It is one of the longest, most congested urban thoroughfares in the world. The city's decision in 2005 to carve out a bus lane in the middle of the avenue is seen as a marquee effort to promote public transportation and get pollution under control.

FedEx Corp. is partnering with the World Resources Institute (WRI) to build on that bus lane by developing similar sustainable transportation projects in Mexico City and other cities in Mexico. For the transport and logistics giant, this project is among the first in an area it calls "environmental philanthropy."

Mexico City has some of the slowest rush hours in the world. Photo courtesy of the World Resources Institute.

Brandon Tidwell, part of a FedEx team that identifies organizations to partner with on sustainability projects, says FedEx is nothing less than an expert on managing traffic congestion. Wall-to-wall traffic in the world's biggest and most congested cities is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in developing nations. It can strangle a local economy and is bad for trucking and logistics companies such as FedEx, DHL and UPS that rely on the quick and efficient movement of packages and goods.

Customer and shareholder demands on logistics and overnight package delivery companies to go more "green" mean, at the very least, their drivers need to spend less time on the roads.

"The challenge is doing that with fewer resources and less of an [environmental] impact," Tidwell said.

The FedEx and World Resources Institute are partnering on a two-year project called the National Network for Sustainable Urban Mobility. Together, they plan to provide technical support to cities as local governments try to plan and put in place transportation projects aimed at getting more cars off the streets.

A 'strong case for joining forces'

"We had a strong case for joining forces in the interest of reducing congestion, pollution and time delays due to poorly managed urban space," said Nancy Kete, director of EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transport.

WRI went to Mexico City in 2002 to work with the local government on building the Insurgentes Avenue bus lane. Kete said her WRI team, which received $500,000 from FedEx in early February, plans to continue the hunt for similar mass transit opportunities in Mexico City and Guadalajara. She also said the project could extend outside of Mexico to India or Turkey, where populations and traffic congestion are endemic in teeming cities such as Delhi and Istanbul.

Nearly 80 percent of people in Latin America live in cities, a situation that some say exacerbates pollution issues. Kete, however, contends cutting industrial emissions and carbon emissions from urban cars and trucks is an easier task for public officials than addressing pollution spread out across a vast suburban area or countryside.

For its part, Mexico City has made some strides in cleaning up fuels and mandating tailpipe standards, but the management of traffic in the city remains a serious problem.

"Most of the air pollution and CO2 emissions in Mexico City will be from traffic," Kete said. "There's not a lot of industry left in the Mexico City metropolitan area. Transportation is key."

Surveys of Mexico City metro bus riders in the past few years have shown that between 5 and 10 percent of riders switched to the bus system instead of driving their cars. If the system can get people places more quickly, they will switch, she said. "You want to see that kind of snowball effect."

Being 'green' while making green

FedEx and WRI started discussing the project a year ago. For FedEx, it's part business and part philanthropy. "Companies that are active and highly visible in cities have to deal with all of the same problems that we're trying to help cities resolve," Kete said. "They get a lot out of being seen as part of the solution."

The logistics and transport industry has come under increasing pressure to measure emissions from the transportation piece of the supply chain.

This week, the World Economic Forum announced that its logistics group had agreed to standard guidelines for calculating the carbon footprint for shipping operations.

Sean Doherty, head of logistics and transport for the World Economic Forum, said comparing the impact of transporting different products is a challenge partly because no working principles exist to ensure apple-to-apple comparisons can be made.

Product shipments, whether by truck or train or ship, often face unforeseeable problems that change the way they measure the carbon output of that delivery. Products also share modes of transportation, further complicating the carbon output measurement.

Accenture, a consulting firm that works with companies on greening their products, asserts most consumers will switch to a new product if it is tagged climate-friendly.

"Logistics and transportation providers face growing demand from their retail and manufacturing customers to report the carbon emissions generated by the shipping and handling of their products," said Jonathan Wright, an executive in Accenture's supply chain management practice.