United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

thumb|Map showing the member states of the commission

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE or UNECE) is an intergovernmental organization or a specialized body of the United Nations. The UNECE is one of five regional commissions under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It was established in 1947 in order to promote economic cooperation and integration among its member states.

The commission is composed of 56 member states, most of which are based in Europe, as well as a few outside Europe. Its transcontinental Eurasian or non-European member states include: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Canada, Cyprus, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United States and Uzbekistan.

History

The commission was first proposed in London in the summer of 1946 by the Temporary Subcommission on the Reconstruction of Devastated Areas.

The commission was established by the Economic and Social Council on 28 March 1947 in order to "Initiate and participate in measures for facilitating concerted action for the economic reconstruction of Europe," as well as to "maintain and strengthen the economic relations of the European countries, both among themselves and with other countries of the world."

It was established at the request of the United Nations General Assembly who called on the Economic and Social Council to create the commission, as well as the Commission for Asia and the Far East, in order to "give effective aid to countries devastated by war."

EE absorbed the function and resources of the European Central Inland Transport Organization upon its founding.

As the commission was established towards the beginning of the Cold War, it faced difficulties in achieving its mandate of economic reconstruction of Europe due to the Iron Curtain: separately the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation was established in 1948 in the west and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949 in the east. The work of the commission had to concern itself only with questions that were of common interest to East and West, as to not cause confrontation. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the economic commissions of the United Nations have been expanding their activities in the former Soviet republics.

Member states

The following are the member states of the commission, along with their date of admission:

Providing the secretariat to the "Environment for Europe" process and participating in the regional promotion of Agenda 21;
Developing and carrying-out of UNECE Environmental Performance Reviews in the UNECE countries non-members of OECD;
Overseeing UNECE activities on environmental monitoring, assessment and reporting;
Increasing the overall effectiveness of UNECE multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and facilitating the exchange of experience on MEAs' implementation. See UNECE Espoo Convention, Aarhus Convention, Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes and Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents.
Participating and/or facilitating the exchange of experience in a number of cross-sectoral activities undertaken under the leadership of UNECE (e.g. education for sustainable development, transport, health and environment, green building), or in partnership with other organizations (e.g. environment and security initiative, European environment and health process).

Committee on Forests and the Forest Industry

The first task of UNECE after the Second World War was to coordinate reconstruction effort in Europe. Timber was crucial for construction, and energy, but the forests had been heavily overcut and production and trade were at a standstill. The ECE Timber Committee emerged from the International Timber Conference held in 1947 in Mariánské Lázně in the former Czechoslovakia.

The main pillars of the committee's activities have been: the collection and publication of the best available statistics on forests, wood production and trade; the exchange of information on forest working techniques and training of forest workers; periodic surveys of the long-term outlook on forests; technical work on the rational use of wood; reviewing forest product markets; and share experiences on forest and forest sector policy.

Committee on Urban Development, Housing and Land Management

In 1947, UNECE set up a Panel on Housing Problems, which later evolved into the Committee on Human Settlements and after the reform in 2005/2006 into the Committee on Housing and Land Management. The committee is an intergovernmental body of all UNECE member States. It provides a forum for the compilation, dissemination and exchange of information and experience on housing, urban development, and land administration policies; and in areas such as Birmingham, a more fiscal issue-UK.

In 2020, the CUDHLM created the Forum of Mayors at the Palais des Nations, an event allowing mayors from the UNECE region to exchange their best practices on urban development, housing and land management. UNECE is the first UN Regional Economic Commission to implement such an initiative that facilitates the cooperation between the UN, Member States and cities.

Inland Transport Committee

The UNECE Transport Division has been providing secretariat services to the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations (WP.29).

In addition to acting as secretariat to the World Forum, the Vehicle Regulations and Transport Innovations section serves as the secretariat of the Administrative Committee for the coordination of work, and of the administrative/executives committees of the three agreements on vehicles administered by the World Forum.

Among other things, ITC has produced:

59 United Nations conventions concerning inland transport,
Trans-European North-South Motorways, Trans-European Railways and the Euro-Asia Transport Links projects
the TIR system (Transports Internationaux Routiers), a global customs transit facilitation solution
transport statistics methods. This activity has hence continued in the form of the Generations and Gender Programme.

United Smart Cities (USC)

The United Smart Cities programme is a joint effort between UNECE and the Organization for International Economic Relations (OiER).

Numerous private business entities and other international and European agencies support the programme, including Environment Agency Austria (EAA), the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), UN-Habitat, and the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP). The programme promotes areas of strategic smart city policy and development. The key focus areas as detailed by the programme are:

Urban mobility
Sustainable housing
Clean energy
Waste management
Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

Implementing Sustainable Development Goals

The UNECE has presented a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) priorities, which resulted from a mapping and prioritization of its existing activities against the goals. These consist of most SDGs except for SDG 10 (on reduced inequalities), SDG 14 (on life below water), SDG 1 (on poverty reduction), SDG 2 (on hunger), and SDG 4 (on quality education). The social dimension is mostly absent. This can be expected since UNECE does not include the “social” agenda in its name, unlike two of the other five regional commissions, namely UNESCWA (for Western Asia) and UNESCAP (for Asia and the Pacific).

The UNECE, with its long history of working on public-private partnerships, has taken the lead in introducing a format for public-private partnerships for the SDGs, called “People-Proof” public-private partnerships. The ECE secretariat was led by Gunnar Myrdal in its first decade. Myrdal refused efforts by the Soviet Union to dictate what staff would be employed in the secretariat.

|2005–2008

|Marek Belka

|2008–2012

|Ján Kubiš

|2012–2014

|Sven Alkalaj

|2014

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|Michael Møller (acting)

|2014–2017

|Christian Friis Bach

|2017–2023

|Olga Algayerova

|2023–present

|Tatiana Molcean

Publications

From 1982 to 2007 the IOS Press published the Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe on behalf of the UNECE.

References

External links

Official website
UNECE Statistical Database