| |
|
Published in Fall 2000
|
Welcome to Trio
|
| |
|
|
Welcome to the first edition of Trio, the new quarterly newsletter of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
Trio reports on the progress of the three NAFTA partners—Canada, Mexico and the United States—working together through the Commission in the protection of our shared North American environment.
While continent-wide free trade presents new opportunities for environmental progress, it also presents challenges. Central to CEC's mission is the development of tools that serve trinational cooperation in seizing those opportunities and responding to the challenges. New insights into the linkages between environment and trade are anticipated in our symposium on the subject in Washington later this month, described more fully elsewhere in this issue of Trio.
For any tool to work in the protection of the environment it must be socially sustainable.
People who will affect and be affected by its use must be involved in its development and implementation. In the pages of Trio you will learn of ways in which the public is engaged in our work in these ways. An article in this issue, for example, discusses our reliance on public input in the evolution of our Citizen Submissions process, the only mechanism of any trade agreement enabling the public to play an active whistle-blower role on enforcement of environmental legislation. Another article reports on efforts to respond to the public's right to know about the presence and origins of pollutants in their environment.
A recurrent theme in our work is the effect that seemingly small events in one place can have elsewhere. Witness the story in this issue on the movement through the atmosphere of dioxins from various forms of waste incineration in the more populated parts of the continent thousands of kilometers north to the Arctic. So, while we are a partnership among three countries, our response to the needs of the environment is shaped by a continental perspective that respects the inherently transboundary nature of the North American ecoregion.
But we must also remain aware of the global context of our work. North America comprises just over one-sixth of the world's land mass and contains one-seventh of the world's available freshwater. With less than one-fifteenth of the world's population, we are responsible for almost one-fifth of all human consumption of fresh water and almost a third of world energy consumption. North America generates a third of the world's total GDP and emits over a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases. What happens here is significant not only for the people of North America but for the planet.
In this and subsequent issues of Trio you will learn, through stories told by a variety of voices from the CEC community, about the cooperative efforts among the three countries in the development and use of a variety of tools, designed and put to use with a heavy reliance on civil society, for the protection of the environment.
Trio will no doubt evolve over time as our own understanding improves as to how it can best serve its readers. Your comments are not only welcome but also indispensable in that process. In the meantime, welcome to Trio. I hope you enjoy it.
Janine Ferretti, CEC Executive Director
P.S. You will also have noticed our new name and logo. The changes were motivated by our need to convey more clearly and directly to a larger audience who we are and what we do. One point that has often been missed in past references to the Commission is that we are in fact a trinational organization with a continent-wide purview. So we put "North American" back into our name and the continent into our logo. As for the monarch butterflies, their successful migration across North America from Canada to Mexico and back again each year relies on the presence of a series of environmental conditions across the continent. In our logo, they represent the idea of a shared environment and the common interests among the three countries.
|
Top
