On October 23, 2023, the 8th China Global Think Tank Innovation Annual Conference, co-hosted by the Center for Globalization (CCG) and the Chinese Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), was held in Beijing. Jeff Nankivell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Asia Pacific Association of CanadaExpressed the following views on the forum:
We do need more and more of these exchanges, all over the world.
Canada has been an active advocate of multilateralism, which has been implemented over the past century, and I would like to address some practical issues. We talk about cooperation, competition, international order, but the most important thing is that all our speeches tell us what we want to achieve, what we want to bring to the people, what we want to bring to the world, what kind of systems, rules, norms to establish. There are two very important and urgent issues that people around the world are thinking about, and they are all about the changes that we are all facing. Because the climate is moving so fast, food security is a concern, and climate action must be taken as soon as possible. Food security is a real challenge, and it is important for people around the world to reorganize our world to ensure food production and to ensure that the world has access to affordable food. The ability to improve people's satisfaction is also a point of great concern to world leaders. If we want to take effective action in this regard, meeting such a realistic goal requires high-level international cooperation, including bilateral and multilateral international cooperation, to ensure freedom of excellence, to reduce export restrictions, to increase harmonized standards, and that technological innovation, including in the areas of protein, breeding technology, should be shared safely.
Over the past century, we have seen a lot of global benefits because there are many benefits to be gained from agricultural innovation. But we are now in an era of regulatory cooperation, and this is where regulatory convergence is important to ensure that we can make progress and give our societies flexibility in responding to climate change.
Climate mitigation also requires a lot of international self-regulation and international cooperation, and we need to raise the bar and focus so that we can make sure that sea levels don't rise too quickly. Over the past few years, despite all the mitigation actions we have taken, we have seen climate disasters continue to evolve with increasing frequency, severity and impact. So, this is a very big challenge for the next generation of political leaders, especially in the next two decades. Even if we have achieved very good cooperation, and we have self-discipline, and we have taken good actions to help achieve the goal of reducing the global temperature rise, the 2030s will be very difficult for all families around the world, and international ** and organizations will have to be accountable for these people, and this is a matter of legitimacy. Leaders around the world must work together to address this issue in order to avoid vulnerability and exploitation by populism. Maybe they have financial interests to chase behind them, and that threatens to reverse the progress we've made.
I would also like to mention here that there is such a mechanism that non-national competition can provide us with a pragmatic model of cooperation, which has been the case for the past three decades. The China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCEDD) in Beijing was created in the 1990s, initially initiated by China and Canada, and has since come together to promote cooperation within such a framework to achieve better well-being for citizens and better protect the environment. The Committee has been growing for more than 30 years, and that's a great vision. Let different institutions, different departments in China, they continue to invite experts from all over the world to discuss in such a framework, which is a very good example of promoting innovation.
In order to achieve these goals, a new focus is indeed needed, and that is to support multilateralism. There have been some recent actions that don't seem to be going in that direction, but what we need to do is build as much of a larger coalition as possible so that more countries can commit to pragmatic multilateralism to address the challenges we all face.
At the same time, when I talk about think tanks, I think of an international system where there are many forums and many mechanisms that are discussed, but think tanks seem to have become a listening mechanism, and our task should be like this forum, where everyone comes together and brings our audience, whether they are from any region, country or global level, to reflect on what we have learned, what we have heard, and to do the discussion. There's a lot of talk now, but there's not much listening.
This article is based on the shorthand of the guests' speeches at the 8th China Global Think Tank Innovation Annual Conference co-sponsored by the Center for Globalization (CCG) and the Chinese Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC).