European Climate Forum


The European Climate Forum is a platform for joint studies and science-based stakeholder dialogues on climatic change. ECF brings together representatives of different parties concerned with the climate problem.

Introduction

The Global Climate Forum is a research-based organisation, which operates as a network of researchers and research organisations, who and which come together to study specific issues related to climate change.
GCF is a “:de:Gemeinnützigkeit|gemeinnütziger Verein”, or non-profit organisation, registered in Potsdam, Germany and since January 2012 has its main head office in Berlin, Germany.
GCF was founded in 2001 as the European Climate Forum by seven prominent European research institutes including:
Since the work of the Europe Climate Forum expanded beyond Europe, and with one of its largest and longest-running projects, the , being carried out in China, as well as other research work in the USA and Australia, the name was changed to Global Climate Forum in January 2012 to reflect this expansion.

Research areas

GCF performs research in several distinct areas which the organisation defines as research processes on its . However the organisation has a strong focus applied to all research processes horizontally. This is the organisation’s ideology of involving a multi-stakeholder approach. The GCF is in fact interested in collecting an array of differing opinions on the issues being researched. This ideology is considered by the CGF as the best foundation for sound decisions.
These stakeholders tend, generally, to form part of the whole network, which forms the GCF itself, but this is not necessarily always the case. They normally tend to hail from government, corporations and civil society sectors, however the European Union and other international or intergovernmental bodies have been involved as stakeholders within the GCF network.

Research processes

Since January 2012, the GCF conducted research within 10 areas or research processes. These are: