Excellencies, ladies, and gentlemen, distinguished guests.

It has been an excellent afternoon. I feel a lot of positive energy and, as others I learned a lot. I want to thank everyone for your participation. My takeaways from the meeting are threefold:

First, we have a golden opportunity; Second, we face a prisoner's dilemma; and third, regarding the way forward, some milestones ahead.

1. A golden opportunity — first of all for business. Our discussion today shows that we are not talking about an opportunity for the distant future. It is an opportunity that is now right in front of us.
• It is an opportunity for businesses. Today we've seen first-hand global companies working in the iron and steel sector send strong signals of commitment to decarbonize their operations:  and we heard how this issue of standards was relevant to their costs, making it do that just because they want to grab the opportunities of the future.
• It is an opportunity for the world trading system because we have this threat of fragmentation, which is raising transaction cost. And if we do not control for that, we will lose both on the economic front and the fight against climate change.
• The WTO is also the place for global inclusiveness when it comes to how we want to organize the relation between our nations.
• It is an opportunity for creative international cooperation since we have in the room governments, businesses, and international organizations together to promote transparency and coherence on standards.
2. A prisoner's dilemma.

Clearly, the opportunity for international cooperation should not be taken for granted. Collaboration will only happen if, collectively, we answer positively to two questions

• The first is do we want to work together to promote convergence and prevent the fragmentation of international carbon standards?
• In accommodating diversity, originality and national pathways to decarbonization I heard mostly a very positive answer to that first question. We do not even need to start from scratch. There are initiatives already been led by, for instance, by the International Energy Agency, the OECD in the context of the G7. There are substantial synergies to exploit.
• The second question is to what extent do we want to cooperate? Here again, there is no one size fits all in regulatory cooperation, it can range from information sharing and consultations to aligning approaches or even mutual recognition or harmonisation, we just have to set the level of comfort that we want to have in promoting that cooperation.

Of course, our rewards, both in terms of economic welfare and climate change benefits, will be directly proportional to our responses to these questions.

So how are we going to confront these questions? I have three milestones in mind.

3. Milestones ahead of us

The first thing that we need to do is a deeper dive with the private sector and standard-setting organisations. From today’s discussion I think that there are some piece of the technical works that are still missing to understand fully the issue.

• One is to completely understand where standards diverge and where they converge, such as on scope and boundaries.

• The other one is to better map the main trade-related existing channels for international cooperation on standards measurement and methodologies that already exist and we do not want to duplicate.

The second thing that we need to do is engage this conversation with the full WTO membership. I commit to ensuring we report on the key findings of today's event to the Committee on Trade for Environment, the TBT Committee and the TESSD — WTO's Trade and Environment Sustainability Structured Discussions.

Last but not least, we will consider I take it from what has been said by several speakers, the opportunity of more informal gathering of this type to discuss how we continue this information exchange.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the WTO's Director General, myself, and our Secretariat welcome your feedback and your guidance, from our members, from all stakeholders, into how to move this conversation further.

Thanks again warmly to all.