Mongolia: Collaboration agreement to deliver inclusive resilient growth signed by City of Ulaanbaatar and Ecological Sequestration Trust
London - The Mayor and Governor of Ulaanbaatar, Bat-Üül Erdene and Professor Peter Head CBE, Founder and Chief Executive of UK charity The Ecological Sequestration Trust (The Trust) and have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, in the presence of Prime Minister Chimed Saikhanbileg of Mongolia, to work in partnership delivering smart, resilient and sustainable development for the people of Mongolia.
The Trust is a member of the R!SE Initiative which is led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). The Trust has been working in Ulaanbaatar since December 2013, supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) British Embassy of Mongolia and Future Earth Ltd., to create an integrated, urban-rural, systems data platform called resilience.io. This tool will enable cities to plan and evaluate the business case for investment in projects that support the delivery of projects that bring improved disaster resilience, human wellbeing, resource efficiency, clean energy and renewable technologies, and which restore ecological and freshwater systems and secure the production of safe food.
The resilience.io platform is considered a leading example of a practical approach to catalysing the shift from managing disasters to managing risks aligned with the objective of the R!SE Initiative to create risk-resilient societies by making all investments risk-sensitive. The approach will draw together funding mechanisms for disaster risk reduction, evidence progress towards targets, and de-risk investments.
The approach, detailed in the report, 'Smart ways to mobilise more efficient and effective long-term investment in city regions', will be presented as a way of bringing forward investment in sustainable projects at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Addis Ababa in July and at the Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Paris in December.
Professor Peter Head CBE, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of The Ecological Sequestration Trust said,
“When I created The Trust, four years ago, the aim was to provide all regions of the world with an open-source, free-to-use platform that would enable them to discover a more resilient, sustainable development pathway – a resilience compass. To do this we had to bring together world-leading modellers in human, ecological systems and economics. However it was also necessary to find regions in different parts of the world with the leadership and desire to bring about transformational change for their people and willingness to use this platform for that purpose. In particular to use the platform to help meet the post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to attract investments that seek lower risk through new governance and data systems.
“The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department for International Development (DfID) have given us excellent support to realise this ambition. It has been a great pleasure to work with Mayor Bat-Uul over the last year and to arrive at today’s historic agreement to work together for the next three years. Ulaanbaatar joins the city of Accra and the UK County of Dorset as demonstration regions with another planned in China.”