Short name: UPGE
Country: France
Type of organisation: Association
www.genie-ecologique.fr
The professional union of ecological engineering (UPGE) is the federation of the French companies from the ecological engineering sector. It is currently composed of about sixty companies working on biodiversity and ecosystem protection, restoration and management. The UPGE organization is split in two colleges, mainstreaming civil and ecological engineering from civil and ecological work levels (college 1) to the technical, learning support level (college 2). UPGE members are sharing the objective of structuring the ecological engineering sector.
Since its beginning in 2008, the UPGE, aims at:
• Networking the actors of the sector.
• Animating the federation.
• Representing the sector face to private and public actors from the local to the international scale, in order to disseminate and bring to light the sector actions and needs.
• Proposing innovative solutions to improve the sector practices and capacity building.
The French ministry of ecology support the UPGE’s action plan since 2012 and confirmed the federation role’s as the leader of the French ecological engineering sector. Thus, the UPGE is the main interface between professionals from ecological engineering and public stakeholders.
In this respect, the UPGE has many fields of actions such as:
• The animation of internal working groups on the good practices’ agreement (normalization, regulation, qualification, etc.) or how to face emerging trends in environmental assessment (soil and ecological engineering, landscape planning, mitigation measures design, etc.) for examples.
• The contribution to local and national guidelines.
• The porting of norms (NF X10-900 on the ecological engineering project management, the ongoing work on the norm about the environmental initial state).
• The capacity building development of ecological engineers in order to face the emerging challenges and adapt the teaching and diplomas to develop the associated skills (diplomas creations, adaptation of existing cursus, etc.) of a young activity sector. As an example, in 2019, the UPGE has supported and contributed to a mainstreamed ecological and civil engineering teaching.
• The contribution to French R&D programs contents (member of the FRB and ITTECOP program steering committee).
To reach its objectives and implement its action program the UPGE, mobilizes its members depending on their skills. Thus, to contribute to the BISON project and in addition to its internal resources, the UPGE has mobilized TerrOïko as a company specialized into technology transfer from lab to market in the ecological engineering sector, cdc biodiversité as a specialist of the emerging green business models, Naturalia, Biotope, Grena consultant and Valhoriz as SMEs from the ecological engineering sector with relevant contributors detailed in the key personnel CV section.
