Combating climate change, facilitating trade, guaranteeing energy supplies, responding to citizen’s mobility needs, reducing problems associated with congestion and tackling demographic change are all issues of fundamental importance for European policy, and mobility in urban areas is intimately linked to all of these challenges.

Sharing the benefits of sustainable growth, tackling climate change, energy and food security and good governance, are interlinked challenges, where international financial institutions, like other international bodies, also have an important role to play.

16. Calls on the Commission to ensure that development-assistance strategies are consistent with the aims of environmental protection and sustainable management of global natural resources, given that economic growth, energy security and climate change constitute fundamental and interlinked challenges; calls on the Commission to explore ways to mobilise new financial resources, to ensure that the conditions for general budget support (including under the 'Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) contracts') explicitly take account of climate-change and energy-security considerations, in accordance with the principle of shared but differentia ...[+++]ted responsibility between countries, and also to provide for increased transfers of new environmentally friendly technologies to developing countries.

The greatest challenges, as proposed by this group, were the elimination of poverty, the establishment of equitable globalisation and the management of climate change.

The above analysis shows that Europe is not facing an inexorable economic and social decline but an unsolved challenge, namely the challenge of anticipating and managing change.

The EU will further enhance its co-operation with Least Developed Countries to help them tackle climate change challenges, inter alia through measures to reinforce food security, capacities to monitor climate change, disaster risk management, preparedness as well as disaster response.