The National Center for Sustainable Development (“NCSD”), a national 501(C)(3) not-for-profit corporation was granted its status in 2001 and reaffirmed as a public charity in 2006. The mission is to pursue through demonstration projects - the economic benefits that accrue to local, provincial and national communities once sustainable resource use practices are in place that ensure standards of human health and safety and promote economic prosperity.

The NCSD, working through its land reuse supporting organization, the Brownfields Stewardship Fund (“BSF”) has helped local communities and state governments to achieve community renewal and job creation while at the same time directly and effectively confronting environmentally contaminated sites that blocked the path to renewal and economic benefit. Working with Federal and state regulators, sites previously deemed too complicated and costly to mitigate were, through example, shown to have a solution; sometime a relatively simple and cost effective solution. With the same approach through demonstration projects, the Board of Trustees has as of September 2009 approved augmenting NCSD's mission to include our most important global public policy issue - climate change. Climate change and the need to relearn how we achieve a sustainable future through better and smarter resource use policy is NCSD’s new and enhanced mission.

In late 2009, the NCSD and the China Clean Development Mechanism Fund Management Center (“CDM Fund”), a Chinese not-for-profit organization established by the Ministry of Finance of China, in recognition of the challenges and opportunities presented by the 3Es, jointly launched the China-US Low Carbon Development Cooperation Program (“China-US Program”) in Washington D.C. The primary geographic focus of the China-US Program is on cross-border opportunities and cooperation between the United States and China…the two largest economies in the world. The purpose of the China-US Program is to explore and develop innovative non-governmental cooperation channels and market-based mechanisms, to facilitate governmental and business cooperation between China and the US, and to promote practical bilateral cooperation on low carbon development through the implementation of demonstration projects. The objective of the China-US Program is to promote practical efforts through demonstration projects that will guide in the formulation of a comprehensive, market-based policy framework to limit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable low carbon economic development, that creates sustainable jobs and puts the two largest emitting countries on course toward a sustainable energy future.

The NCSD will harness the resources and concrete efforts of Chinese and U.S. government-based agencies, business, industry, academia and not-for-profit communities of both countries and channel them into public-private initiatives promoting capacity building, sustainable economic development and investment projects, and practical applications in low carbon, climate resilience and clean-energy technologies and environmental remediation and redevelopment technologies.