Ministers from around the world have congregated in Moscow in a high-level conference to address road safety - the first of its type.
More than 1,000 representatives - including 70 ministers - from over 120 countries are attending the conference, which aims to increase the profile of road safety among policy makers and reduce the number of deaths on the world's roads.
Setting into context the 1.3 million people killed worldwide each year in road accidents, Lord Robertson, chairman of the Make Roads Safe Campaign, said: "When I was at NATO, if someone had shown me these casualty figures I would have assumed that I was looking at the impact of a high-intensity civil conflict.
"There would have been calls for high-profile humanitarian intervention."
The AA is one of many motoring organisations supporting the campaign's call for a "decade of action" on road safety, which would see governments collectively commit to halving the forecast level of global road deaths for 2020 - from 1.9 million to less than one million.
"The UK has a relatively good record on road safety but it is vital that we help the global, as well as local, efforts to cut road carnage," said the group's president Edmund King.
In September, research published in the Lancet found that road traffic accidents were the single biggest worldwide cause of death for those aged 10-24. In the UK, they account for 30% of deaths among male youths and 17% of those in females.
