In November 2001, BP established the "Clean Energy: Facing the Future" Programme in China with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University to create a partnership within China to address the issues and opportunities of clean energy.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at its seventh Conference of Parties (COP7) in 2001 invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special report on carbon capture and storage technologies.