Secretary General,

Director BR,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Colleagues and friends

It is a great pleasure and honour to host this fourteenth Global Standards Collaboration meeting.

Connecting the World, as the Secretary General points out, is not a possibility without collaboration at this – the global – level.

ITU greatly appreciates your attendance and the continued support of the Participating Standards Organizations (PSOs) and the standards community in general. We regret that our friends from Australia are not able to participate at this year’s meeting. And let me also extend a warm welcome to our friends from the forums and consortia that GSC has invited as observers.

Let me recall that the mandate of GSC is to provide a venue for the leaders of the Participating Standards Organizations and the ITU to:

• Freely exchange information on the progress of standards development in the different regions and the state of the global standards development environment; and
• Collaborate in planning future standards development to gain synergy and to reduce duplication.

Further, the mandate of GSC is to provide a venue for the leaders of the Participating Standards Organizations to:

• Support the ITU as the preeminent global telecommunication and radiocommunication standards development organization.

Many of you will have either been present or will be aware that the first-ever Global Standards Symposium took place in Johannesburg, towards the end of last year.

The event closed with broad agreement from ministers, diplomats, senior executives from the private sector and lead officials from other standards bodies on the need to take aggressive action to streamline standards work and end the duplication of efforts within the sector.

I think that you will agree that this is a sentiment echoed by the PSOs and others here today.

The symposium was followed by the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly. One of the major concerns raised there was the problems being faced, especially by developing countries, due to the lack interoperability of equipment being placed on the market. The WTSA agreed that providing for interoperability should be the ultimate aim of future ITU-T Recommendations. I am very pleased therefore that the theme of this year’s GSC is "Fostering worldwide interoperability".

Climate change was also an area high on the agenda in Johannesburg.

At last year’s GSC meeting kindly hosted by ATIS great support was given for the ITU-T Focus Group on ICTs and Climate Change.

The GSC Resolution – ICT and the Environment – gave high priority to standards development related to ICT and climate change encouraging PSOs to closely collaborate on the topic.

With this support, and the participation of more than 20 organisations, the Focus Group was able to develop an internationally agreed methodology for the analysis, evaluation and quantification of greenhouse gas emissions from the ICT sector and the reductions that may be achieved through the use of ICTs in other sectors.

We are now submitting the methodology into the negotiations for the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention which will take place from 7 to 18 December 2009.

Clearly this is a critical issue which has been reflected in the number of contributions that you have submitted to the High Interest Subjects "ICT and the Environment".

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends,

There is a lot on the agenda this week, and we will need to keep strictly to our time schedule. Nevertheless, I hope we will be able to have a good discussion and interaction on the presentations.

Last but not least, I would like to invite you to our Welcome Reception in the Montbrillant cafeteria tonight at 1800 hours, as well as to the dinner cruise on Lake Geneva on Wednesday Evening, which I can highly recommend. I am very grateful to the support of Microsoft, Cisco and Qualcomm which has made this possible – thank you very much.

I wish you a very successful meeting.

Let us now allow the Secretary-General and the Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau to leave the podium …

Let me turn now to Reinhard for a couple of logistical remarks.