The Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) is a series of international initiatives coordinated throughout the western hemisphere between various government, public, private, academic, and multinational organizations. These initiatives seek to encourage the broader use and adaptation of renewable energy, sustainable forest management, and improved land use. Generally, ECPA strives to minimize the effects of climate change throughout the Americas and Caribbean. ECPA was first proposed at the April 2009 Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, by U.S. President Obama speaking to the leaders of the Western Hemisphere, and broadened in a speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the April 2010 at the Energy and Climate Ministerial of the Americas in Washington, D.C.

During its first year, organizations from the United States, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago worked together on ECPA initiatives. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Latin American Energy Organization (OLADE), and multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, partnered with other private sector, civil society, and academic inter-American and regional institutions in supporting ECPA.

Current initiatives specifically address:

• Energy Efficiency: Promote best policy practices through assistance in developing building codes and other standards in the industrial and residential sectors, as well as training for energy audits.
• Renewable Energy: Accelerate clean energy deployment via project support, policy dialogues, scientific collaboration, and the clean energy technology network.
• Cleaner and More Efficient Use of Fossil Fuels: Promote clean energy technologies to reduce both conventional pollution and the carbon footprint of fossil fuels, as well as best practices on land use management.
• Energy Infrastructure: Foster modernized, integrated, and more resilient energy infrastructure, particularly electrical grids and gas pipelines.
• Energy Poverty: Target urban and rural energy poverty with strategies to promote sustainable urban development and improve access to modern clean energy services and appropriate technologies in rural areas that can improve public health and reduce fuel wood use that benefits forest management.
• Sustainable Forests and Land Use: Reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhance carbon sequestration in the land use sector, including through the conservation and sustainable management of forests.
• Adaptation: Assist vulnerable countries and communities with strategies to understand and reduce their vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change.

 For more about ECPA: www.ecpamericas.org