The fourteenth session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development: The energy session

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Notes

1. Special session of the United Nations General Assembly to review progress in the five years since the 2002 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.

2. The chair's report is available in two parts at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs website: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/

3. In 2001 UNEP's Governing Council and the Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GMEF) convened an open-ended intergovernmental group of ministers or their representatives (IGM) on international environmental governance (IEG) to report on improving coherence in international policy-making, improving the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements, and enhancing the role of UNEP. Its final report, culminating in a decision adopted at the UNEP Governing Council's seventh special session held in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2002, identified, among other things, the key role of the UN Environmental Management Group, established by the UN secretary-general in 1999 to bring the environment into the mainstream of UN system activities and to enhance policy coordination across the environmental activities of the UN system and beyond, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

4. The seventh special session of the UN Environment Programme's Governing Council (GCSS-7) and third Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GMEF-3) took place at the Cartagena de Indias Conference Centre in Cartagena, Colombia, from 13–15 February 2002. The session was preceded by the final, one-day meeting of the IGM on IEG, which was held at the same venue on 12 February 2002.

5. The CSD-14 report is available at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs website: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/

6. The one mechanism established after the WSSD to address energy, UN-Energy, is essentially a coordination mechanism. UN-Energy was established to help ensure coherence in the UN system's multidisciplinary response to the WSSD and to ensure the effective engagement of non-UN stakeholders in implementing WSSD energy-related decisions. It aims to promote system-wide collaboration in the area of energy with a coherent and consistent approach, since there is no single entity in the UN system that has primary responsibility for energy.