International Day for Biological Diversity: the ENGIE Foundation, a committed player

Every year on May 22, the UN marks the International Day for Biological Diversity: an opportunity to highlight the crucial importance of biodiversity for our planet and to raise awareness of the urgent need to preserve it. 

For the ENGIE Corporate Foundation, it’s an opportunity to recall its commitment, its concrete actions and its convictions, to showcase its partners and to mobilize ENGIE employees.

More than 30 years ago, in 1992, our Corporate Foundation was created to carry out two major environmental actions: the safeguarding of two major natural sites, the Gavarnie cirque (Pyrenees) and the Pointe du Raz. Biodiversity is more than ever at the heart of the Foundation’s actions and programs for this 7th mandate 2020 2025, and of its two main “Planet for people” focuses.

A necessary awareness

30 years ago, awareness was raised of the fragility of the living world around us.  The United Nations General Assembly then adopted the text of the Convention on Biological Diversity, with the aim of conserving diversity, ensuring the sustainable use of its components and genetic resources, and sharing the benefits arising therefrom in a fair and equitable way.

Gilles Bœuf – ENGIE Foundation company administrator – “Biodiversity is the living fraction of nature in all its complexity”…. ” We are witnessing a steady deterioration in the situation: the collapse in the number of living individuals in wild natural populations is a major scientific fact. In 18 years, we have lost 30% of birds in certain agricultural areas.”

For Allain Bougrain Dubourg – ENGIE Foundation company administrator: “The realization is here. We are all clear about the situation: the living world around us is dying! We must act to halt the decline in biodiversity. We must all take action to reverse the trend: scientists, members of associations or simple “eco-citizens”.

For the Foundation, a shared conviction: 

« Biodiversity must be treated on an equal footing with climate change. They are both intimately linked. »

Mobilize us all 

Be part of the plan: the theme of World Biodiversity Day 2024!

The theme of World Biodiversity Day 2024 is “Be part of the plan”, a call to action for all stakeholders, for everyone, to stop and reverse biodiversity loss.

PLANET FOR PEOPLE with the ENGIE Foundation, act for the preservation of biodiversity in France and internationally in order to :

• Better understand and explore the wealth of biodiversity

• Protect biodiversity and ecosystems

• Educate and raise awareness of biodiversity preservation

With 49% of its projects dedicated to access to renewable and sustainable energies and to biodiversity in 2024, the ENGIE Foundation is committed to the environment year after year. The aim is to take part in ambitious, high-impact projects and contribute to the collective effort of the Agenda 2030 through the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The ENGIE Foundation’s action is based on 3 main priorities:

• Protect biodiversity and ecosystems 

• Better understand / explore 

• Educate and raise awareness

Few examples

The Sentinelles de la Biodiversité (Biodiversity Sentinels) project is a program of unprecedented scope, involving almost 200 monitoring projects carried out by CNRS teams on every continent, in response to a major societal challenge: understanding, anticipating and mitigating the decline in biodiversity. 

Monitoring includes, among other things, studying the biology of individuals, their performance, their health, their reproductive capacity, their longevity… 

The support of the ENGIE Foundation thus contributes to the observation of species, their monitoring year after year, and the sharing of data on an unprecedented scale. 

With the United Nations Conference on the Oceans (UNOC 2025) on the horizon, the ENGIE Foundation has chosen to support more specifically the study of temperate zone marine aquatic fauna.

In addition to the study of sentinel species, the CNRS Foundation promotes the Réseau des Zones Ateliers (RZA), a national research infrastructure grouping together the Zones Ateliers (ZA) accredited by the CNRS Ecology and Environment Institute. 

Zones Ateliers are geographical areas structured around a functional unit (a river, a coastal zone, agricultural or urban landscapes, etc.). 

Some Zones Ateliers have been in existence for 35 years, while the Network itself emerged in the 2000s.

There are currently 15 Zones Ateliers: 13 in mainland France, 1 in the southern hemisphere and 1 in Zimbabwe.

Research aims to understand the functioning and trajectories, past and future, around 3 axes: 

• predicting ecosystem response to global change
• formalize the functioning of socio-ecosystems
• helping to manage and govern them

The Zones Ateliers develop interdisciplinarity between life sciences, earth sciences, human and social sciences and engineering sciences, as well as transdisciplinarity with local players (government departments, citizens, local authorities, agencies, etc.).

Knowledge-building is the primary service provided, with a view to helping local and regional authorities transform towards greater sustainability. This is action-oriented research.

La Fondation ENGIE accompagne en 2024 la création d’une nouvelle Zone Atelier en Camargue dont le sujet porte sur l’étude de la relation Homme – Nature pour la santé et plus spécifiquement sur 

• the development of infectious diseases (this is an area vulnerable to the risk of epidemic emergence, where the prevention of diseases resulting from interactions with the environment is a major challenge, particularly in a context of climate change and rapid ecological transitions), 
• societal challenges in terms of health 
• the “reorientation of the Camargue socio-ecosystem towards resilience and sustainability in terms of health”.

The interaction between living organisms and renewable energies is at the heart of the research supported by the ENGIE Foundation and carried out by the Concarneau marine station (the oldest marine station in the world still in operation). Indeed, the installation of offshore wind turbines involves constant interaction with marine fauna and other species such as avifauna and chiropterans (bats). To date, however, few studies have been carried out on the impact of wind turbine structures on avifauna and chiropterans, and little data has been collected to draw relevant conclusions (how many species are impacted and in what quantities, migrations, foraging, seasonal or regional movements, etc.). 

The aim of the “Eolien en mer” project, led by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and supported by the ENGIE Foundation, is therefore to begin filling this gap by collecting empirical data, and thus to hypothesize two impacts on flying fauna: mortality or loss of space. To do this, the scientific teams will have a network of acoustic sensors at their disposal, enabling them to extract a wealth of data and thus identify and quantify bat and bird flows. In this way, they will be able to draw up highly accurate migratory flow maps and models.

The project is based on a network of mobilized partners, including Phares et balise, IFREMER, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Ecole des Glénans and Biophonia.

IMPACTS 2023 :

Thanks to the support of the ENGIE Foundation: 

• 30 sites in the English Channel and Atlantic Ocean 
• the project has been able to hire a PhD student (50%) and a project manager (100%), 
• Synergy with the Piaff&Co program (ADEME, 2022 2023) on the Floatgen demonstrator. 
• Synergy with the Migratlane program (OFB, 2023 2025)

The ENGIE Foundation is committed to protecting endangered species in Uganda, with the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and its local partner Uganda Wildlife Authority.  Uganda’s Kibale National Park is home to a wide variety of primates. 

The ENGIE Foundation supports the Project for the Conservation of Great Apes (PCGS), whose aim is to study chimpanzees and their ecosystem in Sebitoli, to the north of the park, and in particular their responses to human activities.  

In this area of the park, 80 to 100 chimpanzees live on a 25km2 territory. However, they are threatened by human activities such as poaching, farming, pesticide use and plastic pollution.

IMPACT 2023:  

• 100 chimpanzees protected 
• 518 patrols over 25km2 
• 291 snares deactivated 
• 20 “chimps guardians” (rounds around crops to prevent looting by chimpanzees and elephants)
• 15,000 schoolchildren and adults taking part in awareness-raising workshops  
• 555kg of waste collected and taken for recycling in one week

At 1.30pm on Tuesday November 14, at the foot of the Mont, three young calf seals were released by the Océanopolis care center, which had taken charge of them. 

The Mont is not the only remarkable resident of the bay: a colony of seals has been established here since the late 1970s. It is the third largest breeding site in France (1300 individuals in total), with around 120 individuals and 37 births in 2022. Two species covered by the Habitats Directive (Natura 2000) are present here: the sedentary calf seal, which breeds every year in the bay and is classified as “near-threatened” at national level, and the transient grey seal. Both species use the bay’s numerous sandbanks as resting and pupping areas, and the estuarine zone and channels as feeding grounds. 

The ENGIE Foundation supports the Établissement public national du Mont Saint-Michel in its efforts to monitor and preserve the bay’s seal colony, in collaboration with the Office français de la biodiversité, the Conservatoire du littoral and the DREAL Normandie.  

The ENGIE Foundation also supports ACMOM (Association pour la Conservation des Mammifères et Oiseaux Marins de Bretagne), which runs the marine animal care center located at the heart of Océanopolis, the national center for scientific, technical and industrial culture dedicated to the ocean. Since the center’s creation in 1990, over 700 wild seals in difficulty have been cared for by the center.

The ENGIE Foundation works alongside the LPO to preserve biodiversity with the “Plus de Nature dans mon quartier” program.

The LPO’s “Plus de Nature dans mon quartier” (More Nature in my neighborhood) citizen mobilization program is organized around actions to raise awareness, preserve and integrate biodiversity in priority urban policy neighborhoods. These areas have been particularly hard hit by the heatwaves of recent years, as well as by increased air pollution. The LPO is leading the implementation of the program in conjunction with local players, such as residents, schools, local authorities, social landlords and neighborhood associations.

Program objectives:

• Protect and enhance existing biodiversity in priority neighborhoods
• Encourage residents to become active players in their living environment by taking ownership of biodiversity issues 
• Change their vision of nature, which is often very “aseptic”.
• Train players and supervisors to develop a shared vision of nature in the city

The Pae Pae NO Te Ora association was created in 2003. Its mission is to protect and preserve the lagoon and coastline of the commune of Punaauia.  

Several fields of action:  

• Voluntary actions to collect garbage on the beach and maintain the underwater trail once a month. Information panels and litter garbage cans have been installed in the square to raise visitor awareness.  
• Twice-yearly collection of scientific data using the “Reef Check” protocol, which monitors changes in the coral ecosystem at two specific points in the Punaauia lagoon. 
• Management of an underwater educational trail on Vaiava beach 

The project supported consists in offering free visits to the underwater educational trail. Visits to the underwater educational trail take place throughout the school year, according to requests from the various social services.  

IMPACT: 1,000 children and teenagers made aware of lagoon preservation and waste management every year.