"Climate finance has also emerged as one of the greatest opportunities on the road to 2030, as expressed in the recent UN Secretary General’s Strategy for Financing the 2030 Agenda. A key focus is on putting in place new mechanisms at global, regional and country levels to increase innovative finance," says Kishan Khoday, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Team Leader for Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Resilience in the Arab Region.
Tools and Initiatives
“This is not tree hugging. This is business. With customers and business in mind, the private sector needs to reallocate capital to inclusive green solutions.,” says Anders Langworth, Founder of the Bankers for Climate initiative and Deputy Head of Nordea Group Sustainable Finance.
Tools and Initiatives
The implementation of climate resilient low-emission development (LED) strategies is essential for ensuring the integrity and performance of LED programs and projects in the face of evolving climate impacts. However, most LED planners do not yet routinely consider the potential impacts of climate change, such as risks associated with extreme weather events or climate trends. Fortunately, in the past several years, a variety of tools have been developed by development partners (e.g., USAID, World Bank, African Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank) that planners can now use to determine whether and to what extent climate change may impact their investments.
Research
Big data sets and new technologies can be brought together to create new knowledge products that can provide environmental insight in near real-time. Now is the time to reimagine and supercharge environmental governance and public-private partnerships by using big data, frontier technologies and data analytics to target our action and investments.
Tools and Initiatives
The Resource Efficiency and Climate Action Initiative, launched under the International Climate Initiative (IKI) at the German Corporation for International Development Cooperation (GIZ), has published five policy briefs on key themes related to resource efficiency, including digital transformations, climate protection, infrastructure and buildings, and resource efficiency policies. This blog links to the briefs and discusses the initiative's achievements so far.
Partner in Focus
Inclusive green growth can serve as a crucible for the transformational change necessary to simultaneously achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment while implementing the Paris Climate Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By integrating social, environmental and economic considerations, inclusive green growth pathways can generate the political will necessary to undertake ambitious climate action that integrates gender equality and pro-poor approaches.
Tools and Initiatives
How do we gear up sustainability thinking in Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs)? A recent study looks at three case studies of WWTPs in Germany from the managerial perspective, offering in-depth understanding of the status quo and possibility of improving environmental management in public organisations.
Our economies and ecosystem depend on insects—and they are declining at an alarming rate. While different approaches to insect conservation are being developed or implemented, including biodiversity-friendly agriculture; insect conservatories; restricted use of insecticides; ecological networks, they require significant scale up and support from the policy, businesses and financial communities.
Research
New technologies and smart business models could turn waste into a veritable gold mine of opportunity for African women.
"Reaching the SDGs will require courage, creativity, and clarity of purpose. It will require collective and individual efforts to align our actions and our investments. In short, it will require us to rethink our patterns of how we consume and produce, how we save, and spend, and invest," says Steven Stone, Chief of the Resources and Markets Branch at UN Environment.