Through its global outreach activities, UNEP seeks to increase public awareness and dialogue on environmental aspects and risks associated with oil and gas exploration and production, and to promote international best practice and enhance environmental governance and sustainability principles in countries. UNEP also works to scale up and mainstream capacity building and training efforts in countries through its academic networks.
Global Webinar Series
Since 2019, UNEP has been delivering webinars on a range of topics related to environmental, oil and gas and energy transition issues. The webinars seek to enhance public knowledge and encourage dialogue between experts, private sector, civil society, and government stakeholders from around the world. It also allows UNEP to continue providing additional training support to OfD-supported countries.
Our webinars often attract over 1,000 registered participants from over 50-60 countries on average, and 250-400 people generally attend each webinar. Participants who join our webinars mostly come from the private sector and government institutions, but also include civil society and academia.
Our webinars have included the following:
- Environmental Impact Assessments for Upstream Oil and Gas Operations
- Oil and Gas Operations in Environmentally Sensitive Areas
- Chemicals and Hazardous Waste Management in the Oil and Gas Sector
- Undertaking Oil Contaminated Site Assessments
- 2021 Global Webinar Series on Enabling Oil and Gas Producing Countries to Transition towards a Low Carbon Future, which featured:
- 2022 Global Webinar Series on Strengthening national oil spill preparedness and response in environmentally sensitive areas, which featured:
- Implementing international conventions in national oil spill contingency and risk reduction
- Environmentally sensitive mapping for oil spill preparedness and response
- Oil spill response methods and strategies in environmentally sensitive areas
For past webinars, please see our Youtube channel.
Opportunities for Scaling Up Capacities in Countries
After each training, UNEP receives multiple requests for additional trainings and technical assistance support from countries. Clearly, there is high demand for more trainings to be delivered on a continuous, sustainable basis, considering high government staff turn-over and the need for regular updating of professional knowledge and skills sets. At the same time, available trainings on environment and oil and gas often carry cost implications which may be prohibitive to Government and civil society actors especially in developing regions.
In this regard, UNEP is working with its academic partners comprised of national universities as well as other training institutions to mainstream UNEP training materials into ongoing teaching and training curricula in OfD supported countries, as a means of enhancing national expertise and capacities. Mainstreaming into national curricula establishes a mechanism for providing continuous professional training on environment and oil and gas in-country, thus producing more country-specific training, more national/local experts and a continuous cadre of graduates who may become future policymakers and decision makers who are knowledgeable on environment, oil and gas and energy transition issues.
From 2023 onwards, UNEP will be re-packaging its training library to enable public access of its training materials.
