About ECC

Much has happened since the ECC-Platform was launched in 2005:

Environmental aspects are increasingly recognized as important elements of sustainable peace: The UN and EU have initiated discussions on the potential impacts of climate change on the security and stability of states, and environmental security has become a central issue in foreign and security strategy planning. This is also illustrated by the generous support of the German Federal Foreign Office for this platform.

We have thus moved a great step forward in achieving our objective: to increase information exchange by creating networks among stakeholders from the environment, foreign and security, development as well as economic communities worldwide.

To this end the ECC website appears in a new guise:

• We established a new section dealing with the prospects of climate diplomacy in the light of the increasing recognition that climate change poses severe risks to peace and stability.
• We created regional sub-sections to focus more intensively on concrete case studies, conflict potentials of environmental degradation and initiatives to deal with them in a peaceful way.
• We introduced a video section presenting face-to-face conversations with outstanding experts on environment, conflict and cooperation.
• We integrated a direct link to the ECC exhibition that has been expanded to illustrate the challenges of climate change in different regions of the world.

Doing so, we want to further promote a vivid discussion on issues of the environment and natural resources at the global and regional level. In the following weeks, we want to involve regional partners to enter our editorial team to provide local insights and first-hand information.

The website is a living and dynamic platform, thus never fully complete. The editorial team welcomes your opinion, comments and news on political initiatives, documents, or institutions relevant to this topic as it would help us to further improve the newsletter and the website.

The Editorial Team (September 2012)