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Senior UN official calls for world partnerships to find energy solutions

Xinhua, May 21, 2015 Adjust font size:

A top UN official on Wednesday urged different sectors from the international community to forge partnerships to find sustainable energy solutions to tackle climate change.

At a global ministerial meeting on sustainable energy opened Wednesday at UN headquarters, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said the Sustainable Energy for All initiative is mobilizing governments, the business and finance sectors, civil society and the scientific community to transform the world's energy systems.

"Sustainable energy is the nexus that connects economic growth, social equity, and protection of the environment," he said. "It is central to tackling climate change."

The Sustainable Energy for All initiative, launched in 2011 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has three goals on sustainable energy access, namely to ensure universal access to modern energy services, to double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency and to double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

According to a UN-backed report released on Monday at the Sustainable Energy for All Forum, 1.1 billion people in the world still live without electricity and almost 3 billion still cook with polluting fuels like kerosene, wood and charcoal.

The report also proposed to triple the energy investments from current level to 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars to support the progress in needed areas, and asked for transferring knowledge and technologies to countries with less capacity to adopt sustainable energy.

Eliasson also noted that UN member states have already indicated that energy will be part of this new generation of development goals, saying that it has been recognized that the road to achieve shared prosperity now and in the future is to live up to and balance economic, social and environmental imperatives.

Also on Wednesday, at a press conference here on sustainable energy, American pop singer Akon, co-founder of the Akon Africa Lighting initiative, said the most needed for this moment is action rather than conversation. As the Akon initiative is working to provide Africans with access to electricity, Akon said energy would be the key to African development.

The year 2015 is a milestone for the United Nations as the organization will adopt later this year a post-2015 development agenda which will guide the world's development in the next 15 years.

One significant part of the agenda is the Sustainable Development Goals, which is expected to include sustainable energy as one of the focused areas of those targets.

The ongoing forum on sustainable energy, set for May 18-21, is for partners to create networks and make commitments in both funding and tangible actions to achieve sustainable energy goals worldwide. The forum moved to the UN Wednesday for the global energy ministerial and will conclude Thursday. Endite