Events:
Background for CIELAP’s Partnering for Sustainability Conferences
Partnering for Sustainability 2: Leveraging the Synergies of Multiple Stakeholders to Minimize our Ecological Footprint – 2004 (view conference proceedings)
CIELAP’s second conference was held two years after the first – in May 2004. It set out both to explore how sustainable partnerships could be developed and to demonstrate to the government that sustainability thinking was being embraced and could realistically be achieved by all sectors. This conference showcased many corporate initiatives to demonstrate how the private sector would gain by creatively advancing sustainability.
Following this conference the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade provided CIELAP with the resources to update its 2001 Federal Strategy plan for sustainable development. The Update Paper was prepared in time for CIELAP’s third conference.
Partnering for Sustainability 3: Working Towards Sustainable Urban Communities – 2005 (view conference proceedings)
CIELAP's third conference was held in October 2005 to closely follow the release of CIELAP’s Update Paper. While the first conference set out to look at leading partnerships for sustainability and the second examined how to build effective partnerships, the third was designed to focus on successful examples of sustainability partnerships in a particular context: urban communities.
This conference was held in late 2005, the time by which Canada had committed to have a sustainability plan in place. A government panel was arranged to highlight Canada’s progress towards sustainability. Representatives from cross-sector partnerships across all 3 sectors were sought on the topics of waste, water, and energy; these topics became tangible focuses for conference panels. Each panelist spoke about a successful partnership that they had been involved in, and what made the partnership work.
Overall the conferences and research have successfully built upon one another and led to a greater understanding of how to bring about successful partnerships for sustainability. Although Canada has not yet lived up to its sustainability commitments CIELAP will continue to hold them accountable and press forward with multi-sector partnerships. These partnerships demonstrate that sustainable communities are not a dream but rather a reality that we can achieve when all sectors come together.
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