UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon Joins Global Green Growth Forum In Copenhagen

06 Oct 2011

Next week two hundred global leaders from government, business, finance and civil society will gather in Denmark to discuss how to spur green growth.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will deliver the main speech when the high profile Global Green Growth Forum 2011 (3GF) takes off 11-12 October in Copenhagen.

3GF is an initiative by the Danish government, launched with the support of the Korean government and developed in association with the international Global Green Growth Institute. The mission of 3GF is to accelerate green growth through better public-private collaboration on a high-level platform.

Global business leaders such as Ditlev Engel, President and CEO of Vestas, and Shai Agassai, founder and CEO of Better Place, will also be present at 3GF, which is supported by a range of institutional and private partners like OECD, Samsung and BYD.

Foreign companies choose Denmark as their test market

Both BYD and Better Place have chosen to invest in Denmark, a leader within green energy with an ambitious government plan to make the country fully independent of fossil fuels by 2050. 

Chinese BYD (Build Your Dreams), one of the world’s leading manufacturers of environmental-friendly transport, cooperates with the Danish transportation company Movia on testing two newly developed electrical buses in Copenhagen. The buses can help reduce air pollution and CO2 emissions in cities around the world.

The American electric vehicle (EV) company Better Place came to Denmark in 2009, deciding that it was the best country for testing their EV infrastructure system.

All this indicates that foreign companies choose Denmark as their test market for new green technologies due to strong Danish competencies and favourable government framework policies on green energy.

The latest example of this is the American company Electrochaea that plans to test a new technology converting waste CO2 into renewable natural gas in Denmark.

Among other prominent participants to 3GF are Executive Secretary of UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, the Prime Minister of Kenya, Raila Odinga, and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi.