World representatives are uniting this week in the Russian capital of Moscow in an effort to minimise the number of global road deaths. It is hoped that actions taken by united world governments, taking place on Thursday, could mean up to 5 million lives are saved on the world’s roads.

The inaugural Global Ministerial Summit on Road Safety will urge delegates to agree on plans aimed at a decade of action, with the stated goal being a 50 percent reduction in road deaths by the year 2020.

Such a reduction would mean the number of people killed on global highways reduced from the current level of around 1.9 million each year to below the one million mark annually in a decade from now.

The proposal includes a 10-point scheme that combines political commitment, prioritisation of road injury accident prevention and international donor contributions to create safer infrastructure for the world’s roads. The collective measures are estimated to prevent around 5 million deaths and up to 50 million injuries in the next ten years.

AA president Edmund King, a conference attendee, claimed that the stakes are too high to be ignored, with a failure to act meaning millions of deaths and injuries. King said that the decade of action was critical in addressing the global issue of road safety but acknowledged that a failure to work cohesively together could result in nothing being achieved other than continued fatalities. King pointed out that the UK had a comparatively good record when it came to road safety but that Britain’s role in tackling the worldwide issue was imperative, as it is at home.