About the Global Platform on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainable Energy
Reacting to rapidly escalating challenges of climate change and energy security is paramount on the global policy agenda and elicits urgent policy responses at global and international levels. This all becomes imperative against a backdrop of on-going intense negotiations aimed at clarifying terms of integration of national economies into global markets and at a time of dynamic reforms in the international trade order. Emergent understanding of the bearings that these challenges will have on the ability of economies and societies to sustain themselves within existing economic, technological and social models of production and consumption, generates opportunities and concerns across societies today.
The Global Platform is specifically aimed at contributing to effective international cooperation towards addressing climate change. It does so by advancing analytical capacity of stakeholders and their interaction with policy makers such that effective solutions can be built and agreed by the international community at the Copenhagen meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in late 2009. Also, to set the basis for an inclusive path towards their refinement and implementation, as well as their political viability as the world moves towards establishing a post-2012 regime, and the basis for a future low-carbon economy.
More specifically, the Global Platform will seek to:
- Nourish global policy thinking so as to generate a shared understanding of what are the policy challenges and their interlinkages;
- Provide actors and institutions in the trade policy, climate change and energy regimes with a multi stakeholder platform for effective policy dialogue;
- Foster greater analytical capacity through strategic research, communication and information exchange;
- Strengthen the capacity of actors in developing countries, including Small and Vulnerable Economies (SVES), Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to understand and participate in the crafting of global policy and regulatory frameworks.