Regardless of average income, cities and towns have been acting as the engines of economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region, which now hosts half of the world’s mega-cities. New configurations like mega urban regions, urban corridors and city-regions testify to the close links between urban prosperity and new patterns of spatio-economic activity. Productivity and creativity now enable some Asian-Pacific cities to diversify away from manufacturing and move into the global ‘knowledge economy’. These remarkable achievements have enabled Asia-Pacific to take the lead in socio-economic progress, too, with significant reductions in extreme poverty as well as improved conditions for slum-dwellers, an area where some countries have already reached the Millennium Development Goals.
This study focuses on the design and implementation of environmental standards and regulations, taxes, payments and tradable permit schemes to address agri-environmental issues.
This book provides a much needed look at the impact of climate change on the poor. It convincingly demonstrates that issues of poverty and livelihoods must be integrated into climate change policies to help achieve sustainable development gains. The high incidence of natural disasters, growing urbanization, and increased water scarcity combined with the acute impact of these phenomena on the poor and vulnerable complicates the already enormous challenge of reducing poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. This publication lays bare the social implications of climate change and equips the reader with a framework for understanding how climate change and climate variability affect livelihoods, poverty, income, health, and migration. These scenarios call for greater efforts to incorporate poverty, livelihood, and social considerations into climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. Purposefully targeted policies and investments can support economic growth and poverty reduction efforts and help achieve sustainable development goals. In other words, good climate change adaptation policies can also be good development policies.
The Environmental Stewardship Strategy presents a new corporate environmental management approach – one that reflects the realities and implications of the host of global environmental challenges, while integrating these into a truly holistic, comprehensive strategy. The strategy was developed to provide guidance to companies on comprehensive environmental stewardship strategies to address issues such as climate change, water resource protection, deforestation, toxic waste, loss of biodiversity and long-term damage to ecosystems. While the 8-step strategy offers guidance on topics like innovation, cooperation, education and self-regulation, it also offers a framework for firms to facilitate a recommitment to and comprehensive implementation of the principles. The Environmental Stewardship Strategy builds on the success of Caring for Climate and the CEO Water Mandate programs, and encourages companies to facilitate a recommitment to and comprehensive implementation of the principles. The Strategy is informed by research, tested by practitioners and designed to help all corporate leaders generate value from successful management of its relationship with the environment.
Improving the environmental performance of agriculture is a high priority in OECD and many non-OECD countries. This will be of increasing concern in the future given the pressure to feed a growing world population with scarce land and water resources. Policy has an important role to play where markets for many of the environmental outcomes from agriculture are absent or poorly functioning.
This study focuses on the design and implementation of environmental standards and regulations, taxes, payments and tradable permit schemes to address agri-environmental issues. It deals with the choice of policy instruments and the design of specific instruments, with the aim of identifying those that are most cost-effective in very different situations across OECD countries.
Key conclusions from the study are that: there is no unique instrument that promises to achieve all agri-environmental policy goals; the cost effectiveness of payments systems could be improved by using performance-based measures; and policy mixes need to combine policy instruments that complement and not conflict with each other
This publication offers a general introduction to sustainability impact assessment, which is an approach for exploring the combined economic, environmental and social impacts of a range of proposed policies, programmes, strategies and action plans. Such assessments can also assist decision-making and strategic planning throughout the entire policy cycles. It is not an in-depth or detailed user manual, but rather outlines basic principles and process steps of sustainability impact assessments, drawing on examples from Switzerland, Belgium and the European Commission, among others. This publication is a valuable source of information for policy makers on sustainability impact assessments.