Ladies and Gentlemen,
 
It is a pleasure for me to be able to be with you this morning to welcome you to this event which is becoming a regular feature of ITU workshops.
 
I am especially pleased that this year’s event has as its theme climate change. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon has called this the morale challenge of our time, and has asked ITU to play a role in combating climate change. We responded to this by taking an initiative to look at ways that ICTs can play a part in mitigating and monitoring the effects of climate change, and we will be holding two symposia on the subject in Kyoto in April and London in June. It’s a natural step to look at how these technologies can help the motor industry meet the challenges before it.
 
I am aware that the FIA, and Max Mosley in particular, are keen to apply the leading edge expertise within F1 to develop “green” technologies that would have applications beyond the sport.
 
Honda Racing F1 Team has been one of the main proponents of this policy, and Mr Butler’s company has been kind enough to loan us this season’s new 2008 Formula-1 "Earthdreams car" as the centre point for our exhibition. Many technologies that start in F1 eventually migrate to road cars, so it makes sense to pay particular attention to what the F1 R&D experts come up with in order to have an idea of what we might see on tomorrow’s roads.  
 
The Honda Motor Company is a leader in confronting environmental issues, adopting the Honda Environment Statement as long ago as 1992, and has announced its target to reduce world-wide product and production-related CO2 emissions by 10% by 2010 compared to 2000 levels.
 
Clearly the major challenge facing the motor industry is to build cars that are cleaner and greener. ICTs have a major role to play here. We've come a long way in the struggle to reduce pollution. Today's vehicles are the cleanest ever, and getting cleaner all the time. This is in part as a result of computerised emission controls. Now with the promise of the Fully Networked Car we can realize even greater benefits. By connecting vehicles to networks, we can provide traffic management, monitoring, and analysis, all of which will help meet the climate change challenge. Those who successfully meet this challenge will end up with a real competitive advantage in world markets.
 
So ICTs can and will help to create efficient, environmentally friendly, transport systems which will be good for society, and good for the motor industry.
 
Fifty years ago the automobile was essentially a mechanical unit that involved some electricity to get it started, keep the motor running and keep the headlights on at night. Today, ICTs are an integral part of keeping vehicles on our roads safe and secure. In fact we can forsee the time that there will be nothing on the road without its own IP-address!
 
This merging of technology requires that the World Standards Collaboration partners, ITU, ISO and IEC, take into account each others’ work and co-operate at points of technological interface so that manufacturers can use our standards to deliver a final product to customers that functions as expected.
 
History has shown that standards will play a crucial role in bringing together key players to work together on solutions that – especially in this case – will benefit the entire global community. Collaboration at international level is imperative for the efficient development of technologies and the most effective way to deal with key issues such as climate change in a coordinated manner. I am proud of the contribution that ITU is making to this global effort.
 
Let me give you a flavour of some of the things we are doing this area:
 
ITU’s work on standards to enhance communications in vehicles has recently been expanded to the development of requirements and testing methodologies for wideband communications in cars. This work takes place in an ITU Focus Group which means that any interested party (not just ITU-members) can participate in the work. In this case we especially encourage the auto industry to participate. The chairman of the group, Hans Gierlich, will provide more information of the work of the group later in the workshop.
 
In addition ITU hosts the Advisory Panel for Standards Cooperation on Telecommunications related to Motor Vehicles. Its goal is to strengthen cooperation amongst the standards bodies involved in the industry, to improve information exchange between them, and avoid duplication of effort as well as to identify open issues in standardization activities.
 
Recently, ITU published a report on a new family of standards being developed by ISO for intelligent transport systems (ITS) standards called “Continuous Air-interface, Long and Medium Range” (CALM) and its relation to Next Generation Networks, which is the major standardization activity in ITU and which will overhaul the whole telecoms infrastructure. The aim of CALM is to provide wide area communications to support ITS applications that work equally well on a variety of different network platforms
 
ITU continues to address the technical and operational characteristics of ITS systems such as those for vehicle radar and short-range communications. Current studies are focusing on broadband applications for voice and data communications both between cars and between cars and infrastructures, and several ITU-R Recommendations and a Handbook have been published.
 
Other related work in ITU includes studies on performance and QoS, multimedia terminals, ubiquitous applications (e-Everything), network security, electromagnetic compatibility, satellite navigation, transport information and control systems, software defined radio, adaptive antennas and ultra wide-band technologies, to name but a few!
 
I would like to invite you to become involved in these studies if you are not already. All the details can be found on the ITU website (www.itu.int).
 
I wish you all a very enjoyable and successful event.
 
And now I will hand you back to Malcolm.