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Partner network stands critical for world to achieve energy goal

(Xinhua)    09:58, May 23, 2015
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UNITED NATIONS, May 22-- To make clean energy available for everybody, the international community needs to strengthen the network of partners from all sectors to work together for the shared energy goal, said a UN official in an interview with Xinhua.

Minoru Takada, director of New York office of Sustainable Energy for All, a UN initiative aiming to address energy issues, told Xinhua that the insufficient collaboration on energy projects among different sectors might explain why progress is slow in some areas.

According to a UN-backed report compiled by the World Bank, although progress has been made over the past four years, there are still 1.1 billion people in the world living without electricity, and almost 3 billion still cook with polluting fuels like kerosene, wood and charcoal.

The report, Progress Toward Sustainable Energy, tracked global progress on energy during the period of 2010-2012, points out " access to clean cooking continues to fall behind population to negligible progress overall."

Clean cook stoves--this is a very big area, Takada illustrated, saying that addressing the challenge requires affordable technology, innovative solutions, financing models, policies as well as regulatory setting based on clear determination by the governments.

Takada mentioned the problem lies in relatively separate operations among governments, business sector, and civil society who are working on their own projects.

"In their own way, they are very good, but that's not sufficient. So what we would like to change is that we create a network of all partners." he said. "We'd bring in government, businesses, civil societies and financial together to work on the common shared goal."

The Sustainable Energy for All initiative, launched in 2011 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has three goals to achieve by 2030, 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.

At present, the initiative is working with 30 developing countries, including Uganda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Bangladesh to develop action agenda, based on what the country wants to be doing vis--vis the three objectives, said Takada.

"So by acting up in the action agenda, we would be able to mobilize our partners to get them behind (the agenda), so they would be able to bring necessary technology options, business models, financing as well as investment to help governments achieve objectives laid out in action agenda," he said.

Takada also introduced that they have built regional hubs to support countries to implement their action agendas and to make progress on sustainable energy goals.

"For example, in Africa, the African development bank is working with the African Unionand the United Nations Development Program," he said. "We are working together to support countries to create action agenda on the follow-up investment prospectuses."

In addition to creating network for partners from all sectors, Takada said intensifying international cooperation to share knowledge, technologies and business models is also critical for making progress on sustainable energy goals.

"It is not going to be possible to solve this mega scale problems such as energy challenge without cooperating across the borders," he stressed.

This year, the United Nations in September will adopt a new generation of development goals, Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which will expire later this year.

The SDGs, which will guide the world's development for the next 15 years, is expected to include energy as one of the development goals.

"We do believe that setting this goal in September will make our effort globally even stronger and potentially we will have a transformational impact in achieving energy agenda globally."

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Editor:Gao Yinan,Bianji)

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