Background

For decades, a wide variety of cooperative activities have been carried out in the energy field among the ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and Korea) countries. Such activities have resulted in making significant contributions to enhancing energy efficiency and facilitating energy transitions. To further promote such efforts broadly in the ASEAN region, it is becoming increasingly important to deepen the knowledge, facilitate information exchange, and develop projects and programs with policy designs among the ASEAN+3 countries through various activities, such as capacity-building programs, international conferences and workshops, and joint feasibility studies and demonstration projects.

To achieve this, a new initiative named “Cleaner Energy Future Initiative for ASEAN” or “CEFIA” was proposed by Japan and welcomed by the ASEAN+3 Ministers on Energy at the 16th ASEAN+3 Meeting of Energy Ministers in Bangkok, Thailand on 5 September 2019. CEFIA serves as a platform to facilitate collaboration between public and private sectors for accelerating the development of cleaner energy and decarbonization technologies in the ASEAN region.

As stated in the Joint Ministerial Statement of the aforesaid Ministers Meeting, the 1st Government-Private CEFIA Forum is held in the Philippines on 27 November 2019. The Forum was hosted by the Department of Energy of the Philippines, in cooperation with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan (METI), and with the support of the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) as a Secretariat. It took place back-to-back with the 14th ASEAN+3 NRE and EE&C Forum.