The Earthing and Lightning Overvoltage Protection for PV Plants Guideline Report, developed and published with a special focus on a Lebanese application, aims at establishing a common and general procedure to ensure safety for persons and equipment in PV plants. Due to the PV market’s development characteristics that can be foreseen in Lebanon, it focuses on PV plants that are interconnected to a client’s electrical distribution grid. The report contains three procedures which specifically refer to each one of the three topics covered: Earthing, Lightning Overvoltage, and other transient overvoltage.

The UNDP Disaster Risk Management (DRM) project at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, organized a week long training course on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) for more than 40 young Lebanese diplomats. The training, which was conducted by international DRR experts, aimed at introducing the newly appointed diplomats to the international disaster response environment.

Under the auspices of the President of Council of Ministers, the Food Safety Committee (FSC) at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers organized a Meeting entitled “Towards a Comprehensive Food Safety Strategy in Lebanon” on the 4th of November 2016 at the Grand Serail.

“Social Development Centers affiliated to the Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA) play a leading role in strengthening social stability and local development in addition to fostering communication between the municipalities and local groups” explained Mrs. Suheir El Ghali, Lebanon Host Communities Support Project (LHSP) National Coordinator at the Ministry of Social Affairs, during the launching session of a capacity building programme for MoSA personnel.

For over 3 years, the UNDP “Peace Building in Lebanon” project has been gathering Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian journalists, local actors, artists and media professionals around its publication: the “Peace Building in Lebanon” news supplement. The supplement gets published on a quarterly basis with Annahar and Assafir newspapers in Arabic, L’orient-le Jour in French, and the Daily Star in English with the generous funds of KfW.

Doing investigate reports and elaborating investigative articles is becoming an artisanal job. I do it as a hobby and so do other colleagues as we consider it self-fulfilling”, said Radwan Mortada, investigative journalist from Al Akhbar newspaper. Rami Al Amine, investigative journalist in Al Jadeed TV, shared a different opinion than Radwan. “I personally gave up doing investigative reports due to the legal issues and complications I was faced with”, he said. Mortada and Al Amine were among 30 prominent media professionals, experts, investigative journalists, and public and security officials who took part in a discussion organized by Maharat Foundation in cooperation with the UNDP “Peace Building in Lebanon” project, with the generous funds of UKDFID, around the topic “Sources of Media Coverage and the Right to Access Information: Reality and Challenges”. The session was facilitated by Mr. Walid Abboud, MTV news Editor-in-Chief, at Le Gray Hotel, Downtown Beirut on Tuesday October 25th, 2016.

“The Institutional Strengthening of the Ministry of Environment project was established early 2010 with the objective of supporting the MoE in planning and programming for sustainable development, and environmental capacity enhancement. This publication highlights the partnership between MoE and UNDP and its achievements from 2010 to 2015.”

In the 13th issue of the newsletter, the project highlights the work done with municipalities, schools, media outlets and NGOs in the fields of social stability and peace building. Read the newsletter in both English and Arabic versions.

Energy & Environment was approached by HQ to include a case study on Lebanon related to energy and climate change mitigation theme to be included in a UNDP-GEF publication on the occasion of UNDP-GEF’s 25th partnership anniversary. The publication features a number of case studies from around the world to demonstrate significant development impacts under the various thematic focal areas supported by UNDP.