12 October 2017 (Seoul, Republic of Korea)
This meeting, hosted by SEJONG Institute (Republic of Korea) and Institute of Developing Economies (Japan), aims at continuing the discussion about possibility of building a community or networks on cooperation on the environmental issues, one of the themes dealt at the Hiroshima International Conference (as Track 1.5) entitled "Northeast Asia Peace Cooperation Initiative" held on September 13, last year.
Accordingly, the final goal is to build the networks of individual fields of non-traditional security including cyberspace, environment, nuclear safety and disaster risk reduction, which will contribute to build a traditional security in north-eastern Asian region by taking into consideration of North Korea, and search for feasibility of peaceful cooperation in north-eastern Asian region, by highlighting three policy priorities: (1) traditional and non-traditional security, (2) economic cooperation with North Korea, Russia and Mongolia, and (3) economic cooperation with the southern Asia and ASEAN. Especially, the international cooperation on the environmental field has very long history and a considerable outcome of studies by the academic circles in North Eastern Asian Region and the important agreements in the Trilateral Environmental Ministerial Meeting (TEMM) have been achieved. Nevertheless, a consensus has not yet been well built on the effective policy agenda.
Based on those situations, this meeting was held as the "Track 2 conference" in order to explore future prospects about networking in the field of environment by learning also from efforts made in the fields of nuclear safety, disaster risk reduction and others.
The first session in morning, titled "Experiences and prospects of multi-lateral networking on non-traditional security issues in East Asia" discussed these current situation and future based on three key note speeches.
The second session in afternoon was titled "Sharing Experiences of Regional Cooperation on Environment Issues" and 12 experiences were reported. The speeches besides environmental issues in this meeting include; "Assessment on environment and health by the One Belt and One Road initiative promoted by China by Ms. Hyoung-Mi KIM, Senior Expert, China Office of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) , American NGO; "Experiences of regional cooperation in Nuclear Safety" presented by Dr. Young-Geun KIM, Director of Social Disaster and Security Research Center, Korea University; "Challenges for transnational networking on nuclear safety in Asia" presented by Mr. Hiedyuki BAN, No Nukes Asia Forum Japan which is Japanese NGO; and "The role of ADRC in trilateral cooperation on disaster prevention and reduction: focusing on the nexus of environment and disaster" presented by Mr.Ueda, researcher , ADRC.
In the Presentation regarding the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue by Mr. DORJSUREN Nanjin, Senior Researcher, Institute for Strategic Studies of Mongolia, National Security Council, that dialogue was a Track 1.5 meeting attended by also Russia and North Korea and drawn attention as an opportunity of positive opinion exchange for formulating their consensus. And based on that discussion, Dr. Lee, Vice President, the Sejong Institute said "We hope that this meeting also formulates an architecture of multi-lateral cooperation within four - five years" and this session was concluded by his remark.
(2017/10/12 19:30)