These guidelines will focus on the assessment of managed resources by providing additional detail, key ecological concepts and methodologies for completing a resource assessment, and guidance to incorporate findings into management plans and monitoring systems.
The present document complements the guidelines developed by UNCTAD (2009) for the development and implementation of management plans for wild collected plant species used by organisations working with natural ingredients.
Section 2 will feature examples of applied resource assessments using specific case studies for three traded species based on two information sources: existing cases of UNCTAD BioTrade partners and examples from scientific publications or project reports.
The notion of green growth emerged in 2009. Since then, policy makers and practitioners have largely adopted the term. Although rather intermittently, there have been academic observations on green growth, with the term often being cited as a paradigm and a policy guide for generating new sources of growth. The most important reasons for the surge in green growth today as a new trend and an international agenda item are the rather unsatisfactory results and pitfalls of sustainable development, which has failed at promoting a tangible international environmental principle or a concrete policy framework. Green growth has been proposed as an alternative simultaneously to foster the dynamics of global environmental governance and to reinvigorate the world economy. This study examines to what extent green growth plays a complementary role in existing global environmental governance. Available evidence provides reasonable grounds for arguing that a positive outcome may well be expected from the evolution of green growth architecture and followed by practical policies. It became a global agenda out of a few influential national governments’ control.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2013 in Davos-Klosters, three leading economic voices – the presidents of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – delivered the troubling message that it will not be possible to emerge from the current global economic crisis without addressing resource scarcity and climate change. The Forum’s Global Risks 2013 report echoed these views, with climate change emerging as one of the top global risks faced by mankind. It is in this context that the Green Growth Action Alliance was created during the World Economic Forum hosted Mexican B20 process and was formally endorsed at the the Los Cabos G20 Summit, June 2012, with the goal to scale up private investment in green growth. In January the Alliance also issued the Green Investment Report 2013, which identified the size of the gap in the investment required.
This overview, followed by five supporting reports, identifies these challenges of tomorrow, points to key choices ahead, and recommends not just what needs to be reformed, but how to undertake the reforms. The overview is divided into nine chapters. The first chapter examines the characteristics of Chinas development since 1978; considers future opportunities, challenges, and risks; and describes a vision of China in the year 2030. The second chapter maps a new strategy that will realise this vision, focusing on the key choices ahead for China to sustain rapid economic and social development and become a modern, harmonious, and creative high-income society before 2030. Chapters three to eight elaborate on each of the six pillars of the new strategy: consolidating Chinas market foundations; enhancing innovation; promoting green development; ensuring equality of opportunity and social protection for all; strengthening public finances; and achieving mutually beneficial win-win relations between China and the rest of the world.
This report addresses two of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century: achieving environmental sustainability and turning the vision of decent work for all into a reality. It shows that not only are both challenges urgent, but they are also intimately linked and will have to be addressed together. While it is certain that environmental degradation and climate change will increasingly require enterprises and labour markets to react and adjust, the goal of environmentally sustainable economies will not be attained without the active contribution of the world of work.
The cost of energy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as elsewhere, is an important policy issue, as shown by the concerns for energy affordability during the past harsh winter. Governments try to moderate the burden of energy expenditures that is experienced by households through subsidies to the energy providers, so that households pay tariffs below the cost recovery level for the energy they use. Balancing competing claims- fiscal and environmental concerns which will push for raising energy tariffs on the one hand and affordability and political economy concerns which push for keeping tariffs artificially low on the other is a task that policy makers in the region are increasingly unable to put off. While challenging, the reforms needed for this balancing act can build on much that has been learned in the last decade about improving the effectiveness of social assistance systems and increasing energy efficiency.