RECENT ACTIVITIES OF THE EU-JAPAN CENTRE FOR INDUSTRIAL COOPERATION RELATED TO ENVIRONMENT - CLIMATE – DECARBONISATION – GREEN TRANSITION

Given the coming meeting of the DG GROW – METI Working Group on Environment – Climate to prepare the EU-Japan Industrial Policy Dialogue in June 2022, here is background information on the activities of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation over the last year in this important sector where both the EU and Japan are pursuing carbon neutrality by 2050, and have signed the Green Alliance at the time of the 2021 EU-Japan Summit – the EU-Japan Centre has been explicitly mentioned in both.

Overall, the EU-Japan Centre’s activities combine three main dimensions in order to:

- Inform, mobilise EU and Japan stakeholders, notably from industry, and identify opportunities for EU-Japan cooperation (via events, webinars and analytical reports) and operationalise these opportunities into concrete actions (via business matchmaking)
- Inspire, draw lessons and learn from existing EU-Japan existing business cooperation cases (via concrete case studies) to build new industry cooperation, and engage new stakeholders – snow ball effect
- Leverage (i) EU and Japanese businesses both directly (via B2B matchmaking) and indirectly (via the industrial clusters hosting many businesses, notably SMEs) and (ii) EU Member States Trade Promotion Organisation (via joint action with them – Team Europe approach) as well as Japanese actions and organisations (via for example the JETRO J- Bridge programme).

It is the synergetic combination of all these actions and dimensions that brings high added value to the activities of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation. No single ‘solve-it-all solution’, but a coherent package of actions that – together – are meaningful and effective.