At UN Environment, we like to think of 2018 as the year of consuming and producing sustainably, a chance to close the loop and bring circularity into our purchasing and consuming behavior.
Event Updates
Sustainable infrastructure will provide the services and foundation for growth that are needed to reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity – but to get there, we must substantially increase financing for infrastructure in the developing world.
Municipal natural asset management: how to integrate consideration of natural capital into the major service delivery decisions made by local governments.
The Sustainable Asset Valuation Facility can identify and price the broader co-benefits that sustainable infrastructure brings to a domestic economy, including enhanced GDP, avoided spending on pollution clean-up and public health services, job creation, opportunities to up-skill and more.
"Making sure the Belt and Road Initiative is sustainable requires a myriad of tailored guidance, tools, best practices, and strategic thinking. It requires the active involvement of those with the knowledge and expertise to build green," says Sheng Fulai, Senior Economist at the UN Environment.
"The underlying message of our paper is that infrastructure resilience requires a coordinated policy response to ensure that infrastructure owners and developers have the incentive and capacity to integrate resilience," says Michael Mullan, who leads the OECD's work on climate change adaptation.
Governments around the world are pioneering innovative policies that reduce trade-offs and create positive synergies across and between the water, energy and food sectors.
The "Experimental Ecosystem Accounting" in Uganda project generated a set of natural capital accounts that can support knowledge-based policymaking for improved biodiversity management.
"The concept of natural capital is more relevant than ever, and we need better measurement and credible valuation of natural capital in order to integrate these natural assets into our everyday production and consumption decisions," says Pusham Kumar, Senior Economic Advisor at UN Environment.
"Stranded (carbon) assets are highly relevant to discussions on sustainable infrastructure. Any investment in infrastructure that does not consider future developments such as decarbonization will risk becoming stranded and hence a liability to investors," says Alexander Pfeiffer, PhD candidate at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.