United Nations Foundation

The United Nations Foundation promotes a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world through the support of the United Nations and its Charter. Through our grantmaking and by building new and innovative public-private partnerships, the United Nations Foundation acts to meet the most pressing health, humanitarian, socioeconomic, and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Today, life on Earth continues to face significant threats. At present rates of extinction, as much as 20 percent of the world’s species could be gone in the next 30 years, and more than half the world’s coral reefs are now severely threatened. In the next 100 years, the rising level of heat-trapping greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures by up to five degrees Celsius. This loss of species and vital ecosystems, and the increase in global climate temperature will have a serious impact on the natural environment and, in turn, human societies who depend on its limited Resources.

In response to these global challenges, the UN Foundation is working with the United Nations, NGOs, governments and the corporate community to protect and conserve the environment. The UN Foundation has focused its support to environmental causes in two areas - sustainable energy/climate change and conservation of biodiversity.

The United Nations Foundation's Climate Change/Sustainable Energy Programme is designed to develop and demonstrate the commercial and sustainable delivery of community-based energy services via renewable energy technologies. The UNF`s role is to support programme development, through the UN Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP), for projects that can lead to large scale replication and in so doing can lever additional investment in the clean energy sector.
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Shell Foundation

The Shell Foundation is established to support efforts to achieve a balance between economic growth, care for the environment and equitable social development - the goal of sustainable development.

The Foundation's focus on sustainable development is based upon the Shell Group's belief that the long-term health and prosperity of societies of which it is part, and its own future, depends on the ability of all stakeholders, worldwide, to attain such balance.

The Group's main contribution to the challenge comes through the way it operates on a day-to-day basis. Shell companies aim to be good members of the community wherever they operate. However, as one of the most significant international oil and energy groups, Shell recognises the global dimension of many sustainability issues related to its activities. It believes it has a responsibility and an opportunity to play its part in addressing these issues. This further contribution is the role of the Shell Foundation.

Shell Foundation's Sustainable Energy Programme
At the heart of the sustainable development challenge are two key energy-related issues : the impact of energy production and energy use on the global and local environment the question of what to do about it, and the fact that 2 billion people living in poverty in developing countries lack access to the energy services which they need to improve quality of their life and secure a sustainable livelihood. These issues are the main focus of the Sustainable Energy Programme (SEP).

A charity registered in the UK and launched in June 2000, the Shell Foundation is funded by holding companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group.

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