UNIDO, WU join forces to attain SDGs

17 / 09 / 2019

By Marwa Nassar - -

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) signed a deal to intensify their cooperation towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As a responsible university, WU is committed to making the knowledge it generates, including its scientific research results, accessible to the public. Through its research activities, WU has a strong influence on society, the economy, and the environment. With research units such as the Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development and the Institute for Managing Sustainability, WU actively contributes to the SDGs:

“Building bridges between science and society is very important to WU; we achieve this goal primarily through cooperation with selected partners in business, society, and politics”, said WU Rector Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger.

“The economic knowledge generated at WU helps to shape the development of social systems. Our cooperation with UNIDO and its affiliated institutions allows us to carry out important projects together and receive valuable practical feedback for our scientific research”.

The WU-UNIDO cooperation seeks to create a space for innovation in order to generate transformative learning processes and learning environments to support sustainability transformation processes and contribute to positive socio-ecological impact towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

“To achieve inclusive and sustainable industrial development, we also need to develop and research digitalization, tools, technologies and innovations in the field of SDG-oriented impact assessment and finance that assist our partners understand and improve the impact of their initiatives,” said UNIDO Director General LI Yong. “By creating a space for innovation with WU, we can bring together various resources and expertise that will benefit our Member States at many different levels”.

For the WU, the new Research Institution for Transformative Learning and Impact Assessment (RITA), which is intended to serve as an interface between science and society and an interdisciplinary innovation lab for supporting the implementation of the SDGs, will carry out the joint activities. For UNIDO, a cross-program task force will lead the joint developments, including research on impact assessment and impact investment; scientific and practice-oriented innovations; and digitalization and its potential for creating new learning spaces.