Programme Cooperation Agreement 2012 – 2013

Strategic Directions

GRID-Arendal’s overall strategic directions for the next four years are to:

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

• 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

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