Poverty-Environment Action for Sustainable Development Goals is a joint global project which provides an avenue for the poverty environment mainstreaming process. It is four-year project (2018-2022) jointly implemented by UNDP and UNEP with Global Policy Centre on Resilient Ecosystems and Desertification (GC-RED) as the Managing Agent with a US$ 20 million budget through a pooled fund, financed by the European Union (EU), Austrian Development Agency (ADA), Norway and Sweden through UNEP, as well as core resources from the UN agencies.
Poverty-Environment Action aims at mainstreaming environmental sustainability and climate objectives for poverty eradication into development planning, budgeting and monitoring systems into public and private finance and investment. Eight countries are being supported through the initiative with four in Africa (Rwanda, Mauritania, Malawi, Mozambique) and four in Asia (Bangladesh, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Nepal). Additionally, Tanzania and Indonesia are also being supported with technical assistance.
PEA also provides opportunities to improve the quality of private sector investments to support poverty-environment objectives. This represents the new focus of Poverty-Environment Action—aligning finance and investment with poverty, environment and climate objectives to accelerate SDG implementation.
Poverty-environment mainstreaming is an important part of institutional change process to integrate poverty environment linkages into policy and planning, budgeting and implementation processes at all planning levels. It is a multi-year, multi-stakeholder effort that entails working with state actors to enhance environmental and natural resource sustainability to help achieve poverty eradication.