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GRID-Arendal’s overall strategic directions for the
next four years are to:
•
Focus
on building up a portfolio of larger
long-term projects.
•
Strengthen
our support to environmental
conventions and cross-border cooperation.
•
Emphasize
synergies that draw on expertise
across programme areas.
•
Support
the world’s transition to a ‘green
economy’.
•
Strengthen
our networks and enhance
partnerships.
•
Grow
our potential to bring stakeholders
together to enable environmental solutions to
be found.
•
Increase
cooperation with other UN organisations
in fulfilling the goals of the Rio+20 process.
•
Encourage
innovation and creativity through
the enhancement of organisational learning.
•
Develop
a clear brand. Our aim will be to
make GRID-Arendal’s products instantly
recognizable, and to ensure that the
organisation, and what it stands for, is known
far more widely than today.
To realise our goals, we intend to strengthen
significantly our work practices in specific key
areas, whilst incorporating challenging new
components into our work portfolio.
We intend, by investing in enhanced training and
in new state-of-the-art technologies, to ensure
that GRID-Arendal’s profile, as a provider of such
materials, is greatly enhanced. Our aspiration is
that the GRID-Arendal “brand” will be instantly
recognisable internationally.
Capacity building and the assessment (and
mitigation) of environmental impacts are currently
integrated across all our work. We plan to
strengthen these activities, concentrating on either
specific geographic or subject areas. We will, for
example, increase our attention towards Africa,
placing particular emphasis on the sub-Saharan
region, as well as on coastal states. We will, where
Strategic Directions
appropriate, do so in co-operation with UNEP’s
Africa programme to enhance capacity within
national authorities. This should enable those
bodies to deal more readily with the challenges
brought about by environmental change.
A major strength to be gained from this is the
geographic and cultural diversity and expertise of
our staff. These attributes have greatly enhanced
our ability to act as a successful facilitator of
environmental issues – mediating between
conflicting parties, or bringing parties together
to achieve greater environmental benefit. Our
successes to date have included elements of
continental-shelf delineation and close involvement
in the Caspian Sea Convention. We intend, using
the diverse strengths within GRID-Arendal, to
broaden the scope of this mediation function.
We will also increase our focus on specific issues
such as: assessing environmental crime (illegal
logging, fisheries, mineral extractive industries,
etc), environmental security (food, health,
transboundary water and environmental issues),
and dealing with the environmental challenges
brought about by climate change.
GRID-Arendal has had a long-standing involvement
in the Arctic, acting on behalf of UNEP as an
Observer to the Arctic Council and providing
capacity-building to the Indigenous Peoples of the
region. Building on that experience, and combining
it with other pertinent expertise (e.g. on resource
utilisation) from within our organisation, we plan
to extend polar/cryosphere work into the Antarctic
and High Mountains. Within the latter we shall
look to expand links with the peoples of the Hindu-
Kush and Mongolia. In the Antarctic, work will
concentrate on issues such as the expansion of
commercial fisheries and the role that Antarctica
plays in global climate processes.
Work will also broaden within the marine
environment where GRID-Arendal has acquired
strong expertise and influence over many years.
We shall draw on that to shift and extend the