G7 Public Symposium Resource Efficiency and a Low-Carbon Society: Identifying Opportunities and Implications

G7 Public Symposium
Resource Efficiency and a Low-Carbon Society:
Identifying Opportunities and Implications

Resource efficiency was featured prominently in the Leader's Declaration of the G7 Elmau Summit in June 2015, leading to the establishment of the G7 Alliance on Resource Efficiency, which aims at sharing best practices among stakeholders including the private sector, bublic sector, institutions, academia, consumers, and civil societies. Under the leadership of Germany's previous presidency, the G7 Alliance was tasked with organizing a series of workshops on resource efficiency; and this year, under the Japanese presidency, workshops on international cooperation, and supply chain management with the US government, have been hosted.

At the global level, the consumption of natural resources and production of waste have increased to a greater scale than ever before. Production, consumption, disposal, and the life-cycle of materials, which are the focus of resource efficiency, have a strong relationship with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Increasing resource efficiency through promotion of the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), including through remanufacturing, greatly contributes to the reduction of GHGs, in addition to reducing resource consumption. It is vital that attention is drawn to the positive implications of a low-carbon society for resource efficiency initiatives and vice versa. "Toyama Framework on Material Cycles", which was adopted at the G7 Toyama Environmental Ministers' Meeting in May 2016, also calls for integrating promoting measures on resource efficiency and the 3Rs, climate change, and other relevant issues in a holistic manner.

In particular, after the adoption of the Paris Agreement at UNFCCC COP 21 in 2015, the importance of creating linkages between resource efficiency policy and climate policy has been raised. For example, the International Resource Panel (IRP), in their latest report that was launched in Toyama this May, stated that both improving resource efficiency is indispensable for meeting climate change targets cost effectively, and could allow global resource extraction to be reduced by 28% by 2050.

As the next step towards bridging resource efficiency and low-carbonization, we need to identify what a resource circulation system in a low-carbon society looks like in the long to medium term, and what measures are needed to achieve it. In line with these developments, the Ministry of the Environment, Japan, with the United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), are organizing a public symposium aimed at sharing best practices and opinions as well as providing a networking opportunity for the stakeholders as a part of initiative under the G7 Alliance on Resource Efficiency.

1. Outline
Date and Time: Tuesday, 13 December 2016, 14:00-18:00.
*Registration starts at 13:30
Venue: U Thant International Conference Hall (3rd floor), Tokyo
(5-53-70 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan)
http://unu.edu/about/contact-us#location
Co-organizers：Ministry of the Environment, Japan (MOEJ)
United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS)
Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)

2. Tentative Program (Including confirmed participants--more to follow)
[Panel discussion: Starting Points for Resource Efficiency and Climate Change]
- Yuichi Moriguchi, Professor, Tokyo University
- Kohmei Halada, National Institute for Materials Science, Japan
- Sangwon Suh, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
[Panel discussion: Practices for Resource Efficiency and Climate Change]
- G7 members
[Panel discussion: G7 Framework and Resource Efficiency]
- G7 members
- Janez Potočnik, Co-chair of the International Resource Panel
- Shardul Agrawala, Head of the Environment and Economy Integration Division, OECD

3. Registration
- Pre-registration is required to attend the workshop.
Please complete online registration through the website below, by 7 December 2016.

For online registration, visit: http://www.omc.co.jp/g7alliance/en/index.html

For Japanese