The Bellona Foundation is a multi-disciplinary international environmental NGO based in Oslo, Norway. Founded in 1986 by Frederic Hauge and Rune Haaland as a direct action protest group, it has since blossomed into a recognized technology and solution-oriented environmental champion with offices on two continents. Altogether, close to 75 ecologists, nuclear physicists, scientist, engineers, economists, lawyers, advisers and journalists work at Bellona.
Through offices located in Brussels, Washington DC, St. Petersburg, Murmansk and Oslo, Bellona works with relevant governments, experts and other NGOs to achieve sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental problems. These include fighting global warming, the clean-up of the Cold War legacy in Russia, and the safety of the oil and gas industry in Europe.
In February 1996, Russian FSB arrested Bellona's Russian expert Alexander Nikitin and charged him with treason through espionage for his contributions to a Bellona report on the nuclear safety within the Russian Northern Fleet. He was fully acquitted by the Russian Supreme Court in 2000.
At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Bellona presented 101 Solutions to climate change.
The Bellona Foundation was sponsored between 2005 and 2008 by the Norwegian oil company Statoil with 500,000 NOK (approx.€ 55,000).
Bellona and Statoil have opposing views on important environmental issues, but they both acknowledge that dialogue can be an important tool in order to promote better environmental standards. Through objective dialogue and by challenging each other they hope to further the development of new and better solutions for tackling the global climate challenges through the development of forward-looking solutions.
Statoil is one of more than 100 businesses, organisations and enterprises that have partaken in the foundations B7-program –since it was introduced in 1998.
The foundations cooperation program for industry and business came about as a result of recognition by the Bellona Foundation that the environmental movement alone would not be able to impel the necessary technological changes in order to counter the impending threats against our common environment. Through this program, Bellona wanted to extend a hand to those enterprises that were willing to take the environment in earnest, and to offer them an arena on which they could prove their commitment by working together in order to take the step from being part of the problem to become part of the solution.
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)