UNIDO's role and views
UNIDO has a unique mandate in the UN system to support sustainable industrialization. By the virtue of that mandate, since 1967 UNIDO is an authoritative voice in the system on issues of technology transfer, development of small scale businesses, promotion of technology and investment and environmental management in industry, including cleaner production and the implementation of MEAs with direct implications for industry, such as the Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol.
Energy generation and energy end-use are at the heart of technological strategies for mitigating climate change, and the industrial sector will continue to play a central role in this global effort. At the same time, industrialization brings greater demand for energy and energy services:
- Industry, which spans a wide range of activities, accounts for 41 percent of global energy use and 43 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and
- Industry also accounts for 65 percent of the global growth of GHG emissions.
Therefore, energy efficiency improvements and industrial process optimization are major opportunities to reduce CO2 and other GHG emissions. Here, the challenge is to reduce CO2 emissions despite the increased demand for energy services.
As such, industrialization without the transfer of environmentally sound technologies has an adverse impact on Climate Change; thus, to be sustainable, UNIDO advocates the need for large-scale technical assistance and transfer of clean energy technologies and know how. Similarly, Climate Change mitigation and other environmental and resource management goals need economic growth that can be achieved through business investment for industrialization and the accumulation of knowledge , technology upgrading, and technical changes.
At the same time, it should be recognized that industry is vulnerable to climate change impacts. Therefore, addressing climate change from the industrial perspective requires a careful and systematic assessment of industrial vulnerability to climate impacts. Based on such assessment, response measures have to be designed addressing the impacts of climate change on physical assets, inputs and supply chains, transportation, access to water and energy, industrial productivity and industrial safety.
