OREANDA-NEWS. ENGIE and UN-Habitat’s World Urban Campaign have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to join forces for a better urban future.

By joining the World Urban Campaign (WUC) as a Sponsoring Partner, ENGIE becomes an official partner of UN-Habitat and commits itself to the agency’s overall mandate: to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities.

ENGIE becomes part of the WUC #UrbanThinkers community with more than 136 partners to date. The WUC is an advocacy and partnership platform to raise awareness about positive urban change in order to achieve green, productive, safe, healthy, inclusive, and well planned cities. The WUC is part of UN-Habitat’s work programme. It is governed by a Steering Committee, composed of UN-Habitat partner organizations, and acts as an advisory body to UN-Habitat’s Executive Director Dr. Joan Clos.

ENGIE – A GLOBAL PRESENCE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS FOR RAPIDLY GROWING CITIES

ENGIE is a global energy player acting in 70 countries. The Group develops its businesses around a model based on responsible growth to take on the major challenges of energy’s transition to a low-carbon economy: access to sustainable energy, climate-change mitigation and adaptation, and the rational use of resources.

ENGIE aims at becoming the leading architect of the energy transition, and cities have emerged as key drivers of this transformation. Representing 54% of the world’s population today – a proportion that will grow to 70% by 2050 – as well as 75% of total energy consumption and 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, cities are more than ever the places where global challenges in demographics, natural resources, and climate play out. To better address the needs of its urban stakeholders, the Group is working with local ecosystems and making its diverse capabilities available to cities through customized, outcome-based solutions that integrate a wide range of services. These include decentralized renewable energy production, eco-districts, smart grids, green mobility, security, e-citizenship, and more.

ENGIE is proud to join the World Urban Campaign associating all stakeholders involved in the preparation of Habitat III, which is a unique opportunity to foster innovation and promote solutions making cities safer, more sustainable, efficient and attractive.

MOBILIZING FOR CLIMATE

ENGIE was an official partner of COP21, the 21st UN Conference on climate change in Paris last December. At this critical time, ENGIE set out its commitments to a global carbon pricing and its involvement on the international climate change negotiations.

TOWARDS THE CITY WE NEED, HABITAT III AND BEYOND

The WUC builds on the main legacy of the Habitat II Conference (Istanbul, 1996). In particular, the campaign comes as a direct response to the need for partnerships between governments and the private sector, civil society organizations, local authorities, the research community, trade unions, parliamentarians, professional organizations, youth and women groups, in order to achieve sustainable urban development. This spirit of partnership was first concretized after the conference by two global campaigns (1999) on the themes of Secure Tenure and Good Urban Governance. Those two UN-Habitat campaigns were merged in 2009 to form the World Urban Campaign, a single forward looking strategic campaign to mobilize networks of Habitat Agenda partners to implement a shared vision of sustainable urbanization. From its inception in 2009, the WUC has moved from a network of organizations united by the same purpose towards a strong platform dedicated to identified advocacy and knowledge sharing goals. 

In light of the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), which will be one of the first large UN Conferences after COP21 and will be held in Quito/Ecuador from 17 to 20 October 2016, the WUC has gradually asserted itself as a consensus-building platform towards a New Urban Agenda, the main outcome document of Habitat III. Through various activities, such as The City We Need, the Urban Thinkers Campuses, Urban Campaigns and a special initiative, the General Assembly of Partners (GAP), the WUC encourages its partners to contribute not only to the New Urban Agenda, but also to the implementation of the recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities.