The United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) and Italian energy company Enel are teaming up in an effort to address food security and climate change by providing green cook stoves and solar panels to communities. The new partnership between WFP and Enel was announced at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban. Enel has pledged up to €8 million (US$10.7 million) in the agreement, which includes commitments by two Enel companies and the Enel Group’s nonprofit organization to support WFP humanitarian and environmental protection programs.
Enel Trade has committed to support WFP’s Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy in Humanitarian Settings (SAFE) Initiative, which provides high-efficiency cooking stoves to schools, community centers and poor households for use in cooking WFP food rations. WFP has already distributed over 140,000 stoves to 927,000 people in Sudan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Haiti. The SAFE Initiative also aims to protect women against violence during firewood collection and to reduce deforestation and carbon emissions by making stoves more fuel-efficient. Enel Trade will work with WFP to develop a business model for generating carbon emission reduction credits by analyzing the use of these high-efficiency cook stoves.
Another Enel company, Enel Green Power, will help WFP decrease its carbon footprint by installing solar panels on UN Humanitarian Response Depots, sites managed by WFP where emergency supplies are handled and stored. Enel will pilot the solar initiative at sites in Italy, Panama, United Arab Emirates and Ghana.
Additionally, funds from Enel will go towards supporting WFP activities in Latin America. Enel Cuore, the independent, nonprofit organization within the Enel Group, has committed to support WFP initiatives in Latin America where the Enel Group is present.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
