SUN – the Strong Universal Network – is a new movement to respond to existential climate change and supports the intensifying 2050 carbon targets of the Paris Agreement.  It is a legacy of the late Maurice Strong, the visionary who led many historical sustainable development initiatives, including the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. He was a champion of climate resilience and green travel.

We are spearheading SUN to underscore the reality of climate change and the imperative of rapid, continuous response.

We advocate Impact-Travel – with green growth at the core; all impacts measured for sustainable management and long-range, local development paramount. But our focus in the evolving myriad of sustainable development goals (SDG) targets will be climate resilience.

We are developing an out-of-the-box, solar-powered, web-connected support system that every community can readily access, to shape climate adaptation through Impact-Travel. The global center will launch in 2017 in the Hoge Kempen National Park in Belgium, linked to Hasselt University’s Science Research Unit.  We will expand the network to cover all UN regions in 2018, with global deployment for 2020.

Our centers and national nodes will become a new source of climate resilience facts, presentations, analytics, and innovation, with an emphasis on universities and national parks.

SUN is supported and managed by a Belgian Green Growth & Travelism Institute (GGTI) with a small management team and likeminded committed partners around the world. It has been financed by its founders to start up.

For more information, visit thesunprogram.com

The author, Professor Geoffrey Lipman, is the co-founder of SUN and President of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP), a travel and tourism coalition of global destinations committed to quality service and green growth. For more information and to become a member of ICTP for free, visit ictp.travel.