EO Announces New Partnership with Global Infrastructure Basel: Expansion of Positive Impact and Raise Global Standards for Responsible Energy and Infrastructure Development Practices
While Equitable Origin (EO) works to raise the bar for social and environmental practices by energy developers, the Switzerland-based foundation Global Infrastructure Basel (GIB) pursues a parallel mission of promoting responsible and sustainable infrastructure development. This week, EO officially joined forces with GIB to combine expertise, share information and resources, and broaden positive impacts in the energy and infrastructure industries.
The agreement arose from the organizations’ shared dedication to socially and environmentally responsible development projects, and their trans-Atlantic collaboration is set to raise awareness of best practices and elevate standards worldwide. EO and GIB solidified their commitments to cross-promotion and mutual support with a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with an initial duration of two years. “With so much overlap in our missions and approaches to improving social and environmental practices through standards and certification, the EO-GIB relationship has been growing organically for more than two years, and the MoU is the latest step in that growth,” Explained EO’s CEO Soledad Mills. “We are extremely excited to enter into an official partnership with GIB, and anticipate enhanced awareness and broader positive impacts of both organizations’ work for safer, more responsible, and more equitable development projects.”
“Teaming up with Equitable Origin is about creation of synergies, strengthening of service provision and better market transparency. This collaboration between two standards systems also helps to better satisfy stakeholder needs and market demand related to the very complex areas of energy and infrastructure project developments” said Hans-Peter Egler, CEO of GIB.
The organizations’ complementary performance standards, EO’s EO100™ Standard for Responsible Energy Development and GIB’s Standard for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure (SuRe®), are rigorous standards that produce clear rankings by which investors, regulators, and consumers can measure the social and environmental performance of development projects. The combination of these two groundbreaking standards offers a potential multiplier effect on the promotion and implementation of best practices in energy and infrastructure development. As the social and environmental impacts of energy development expand across the globe and the impacts of climate change intensify, developers and investors will need more robust tools to guide and measure best practices and ensure sustainability and resiliency. Working together, EO and GIB can provide those tools as well as the support and expertise needed to apply them effectively. The result will be safer, stronger, cleaner development projects that bring valuable benefits to local communities, in the energy sector and beyond.