The Executive Board of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations approved the following resolution in San José, Costa Rica, on 6 March 2022.
The World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) with its members, representing more than 30 million engineers in some 100 countries, expresses its deep concerns about the ongoing war situation in Ukraine.
- WFEO, as an associate NGO to UNESCO and an NGO in consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, with the constitutional mission “to foster peace throughout the world”, values multilateral cooperation and dialogue, and supports all efforts, especially within the scientific and technological global community, which would facilitate a peaceful resolution of the armed conflict.
- WFEO calls for UN institutions and national governments to take every possible measure to protect human lives and to preserve civil infrastructure, schools, hospitals, transports, communications, food and energy supply.
- WFEO has member institutions in both Ukraine and Russia, as well as in most neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe. We encourage them to maintain an open dialogue that will be in the best interest of their communities, and to support any initiative to provide assistance in the context of the humanitarian crisis, within and beyond the borders of Ukraine.
As the global engineering organization dedicated to sustainable development, WFEO is very concerned about the damage that the conflict ís bringing to the global effort towards scientific, technological and industrial cooperation, especially to address the world’s most pressing problems, including climate change, clean water and sanitation for all and access to clean reliable low carbon energy.
The world is only starting to recover from the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and urgently needs to take more integrated approaches to addressing the challenges of climate change and building global resilience. In such a context, the military confrontation is not only something that we all reject, from the engineers’ standpoint, it is something that no country and community in the world can afford.