This policy brief highlights key lessons from Poverty-Environment Initiative/Poverty-Environment Action experience. Based on this and complementary experience, it proposes a practical organizing framework for integration – organized around the typical decision-making cycle of planning, budgeting, investing, executing, monitoring, review and dialogue. Integration in one step reinforces results in another.

Poverty-Environment Action Malawi has fostered integration of environmental sustainability and climate objectives in development planning, budgeting and monitoring systems; and incentivized shifts in public and private investments towards environmental sustainability and climate objectives for poverty eradication. During a visit to Malawi undertaken in October 2022, organized by United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), UNDP Malawi introduced our team to the main tools used to build support for Poverty-Environment Action, with a special focus on agricultural and gender reforms. Three seminal reports and policy briefs developed through the Poverty-Environment Action Malawi – the Climate Smart Aquaculture Toolkit, Soil Loss Mitigation Action Plan and Strategy and the companion Policy Brief, Route to Sustainable Land Management in Malawi: Soil Conservation and Restoration – highlight opportunities for addressing aquaculture and soil and nutrient losses issues in Malawi. The Cost-Benefit Analysis of the ADAPT PLAN report and policy brief demonstrate the efficiency and impact of various climate adaptation interventions on community livelihoods, environment and natural resources. The findings of the report helped build the case for strengthening support for women-led cooperatives in Malawi.

On a breezy morning in late November 2022, a team from UNEP and UNITAR set out in Coast Guard pontoon boats to view up close installations of solar photovoltaic buoys and lighthouses which serve to safely guide navigation in Jakarta Bay. The solar installations are part of the effort to put the country on the path to decarbonisation and meet commitments set in Indonesia‘s Enhanced Nationally Determined Contribution, in fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals. The joint project UNDP‒UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) supported government efforts to develop and implement tools to support measures which qualify for Green Bond/Green Sukuk (Islamic Bond) investments. A Green Sukuk issuance in 2019 funded the Double Track Railway Project in North Java Line Double track railway, making transportation in and out of the Capital more sustainable. Through the Sustainable Development Finance Project, Poverty-Environment Action, the successor to PEI, continued to support the country‘s Green Sukuk initiatives by building capacity among Government officials to employ climate and gender-sensitive budgeting and investment.