Global Plan of Action: Mainstreaming Sustainable Energy Solutions in Displacement Settings

The Clean Energy Solutions Center, in partnership with United Nations Foundation’s Energy Access Practitioner Network, hosted this webinar on how the Global Plan of Action Framework works to support and amplify the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, the Agenda for Humanity as well as existing energy/humanitarian interventions, such as the Safe Access to Fuel and Energy (SAFE) Working Group, the UN Refugee Agency’s Global Strategy for SAFE, the World Food Programme’s SAFE initiative, the Moving Energy Initiative and the Smart Communities Coalition.

Today, over 134 million people need humanitarian assistance because of conflicts, natural disasters and other complex global challenges. Access to fuel and energy is critical to essential activities such as cooking meals, heating shelters, cooling vaccines, charging mobile phones and powering humanitarian operations. Current energy practices in situations of displacement are often inefficient, polluting, unsafe, expensive and inadequate for displaced people, harmful to the surrounding environment and costly for implementers.

To address this challenge, the Global Plan of Action framework was created through a multi-stakeholder and intersectoral approach. On July 11, 2018, the framework was launched alongside the 2018 Global Review of Sustainable Development Goal 7 at the High-Level Political Forum. The event highlighted the need for leaving no one behind and how the Global Plan of Action movement can be a tool for accelerating progress on sustainable energy solutions in situations of displacement.

For the webinar, a moderated Q&A session was held with representatives of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, who are coordinating this effort.

For more info, visit onlinelearning.unitar.org/global-plan-of-action.