REMINDER: Trade and Environment in North America 2008
Montreal, 3/14/2008
New deadline to request financial assistance.
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), in cooperation with Arizona State University’s North American Center for Transboundary Studies (NACTS), will host Trade and Environment in North America 2008 from 22-24 April in Phoenix, Arizona.
The events are open to the public and will feature discussions on reducing the environmental impact of trade corridors and evaluating what has been learned from some 10 years of research on trade and the environment. A one-day symposium will present new research evaluating the environmental impacts of trade on the environment.
The events, which will include presentations from some of North America’s top experts on environment and trade issues, will take place over three days:
22 April – Greening North America’s Trade Corridors. Sponsored by NACTS, this series of panel discussions will focus on environmental issues related to NAFTA’s trade corridors and borders.
23 April – Fourth North American Symposium on Assessing the Environmental Effects of Trade: Services and the Environment. For this event, the CEC has commissioned 12 research papers that will look at environmental issues in the services sector, including tourism, transportation, waste and financing. The papers will be presented by their authors.
24 April – Environmental Assessment of NAFTA: Lessons Learned from the CEC’s Trade and Environment Symposia. This public forum, hosted by the CEC’s Joint Public Advisory Committee, will provide an opportunity to review the proceedings, results, and recommendations of past CEC symposia in order to develop recommendations for enhancing the usefulness of future symposia and identify possible topics for them.
More information about the meetings, including a registration form, is available at: www.cec.org/symposium. A draft agenda will be made available soon. Please send an e-mail to info@cec.org if you would like to receive updates by e-mail.
Registration to all events is free-of-charge. Nonprofit organizations and individuals may request limited financial assistance (travel and accommodations) to attend the meeting. Requests to receive financial assistance can be made by pre-registering for the event before 24 March and must be accompanied by a written statement of interest demonstrating expertise and outlining the topic(s) to be addressed at the public meeting. Financial assistance is limited to one person per organization.
Following the symposium, the research papers will be published online in their original languages and in a proceedings document. The CEC has already published nearly 40 research papers from the previous symposia on topics including investment and growth, and energy and agriculture, all of which are available from www.cec.org/symposium.
About the CEC
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) was established in 1994 by the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States through the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, a parallel environmental agreement to NAFTA. As of 2020, the CEC is recognized and maintained by the Environmental Cooperation Agreement, in parallel with the new Free Trade Agreement of North America. The CEC brings together a wide range of stakeholders, including the general public, Indigenous people, youth, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and the business sector, to seek solutions to protect North America’s shared environment while supporting sustainable development for the benefit of present and future generations
The CEC is governed and funded equally by the Government of Canada through Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Government of the United States of Mexico through the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, and the Government of the United States of America through the Environmental Protection Agency.