Transatlantic Climate Bridge: a promising initiative

For decades, North Americans and Europeans have joined forces successfully to address the key challenges facing us. Today, an opportunity exists to tackle the common challenge of climate change and energy security - together.

A stable climate and sustainable, reliable, and affordable sources of energy are crucial to the world’s economies. A joint commitment to invest in newer, cleaner sources of energy can create new jobs and world-class industries, clean up the environment and protect the climate, improve standards of living and enhance global security.

Germany has ambitious targets for reducing green house gas emissions, and its renewable energy sector already employs about a quarter of a million people.

Working together, Germans, Canadians and North-Americans can be powerful motors for transatlantic and broader global cooperation on climate and energy policies. Building on the existing transatlantic relations, the German Foreign Office and the German Environment Ministry successfully launched a ‘New Era in Transatlantic Climate and Energy Politics’ at an international conference in Berlin in September 2008.

The Transatlantic Climate Bridge Initiative intends to connect all those who seek to make a difference — at the local, the state and the federal level. The aim is to support platforms and partnerships that help North-Americans and Germans exchange their know-how and to pave the way for joint solutions.

Germany has an important story to tell about how taking action on climate change can produce economic benefits. Germany's integrated energy and climate policy is successfully addressing its energy, climate and economic goals. It has put the country on a path of less energy dependence, it is creating a low carbon society, and it has also created a new industrial sector and new jobs. German stakeholders are interested in exchanging their experiences and best practices with their North American counterparts, and the hope is that the Transatlantic Climate Bridge will facilitate this exchange. (German Embassy)