The United Nations Rio+20 Conference called last year for urgent action to put the world on a more equitable and sustainable development path. Countries agreed that systems and behaviors that worsen poverty and inequalities, exclude women and marginalize others, are pushing our planet to its limits and must change.

Achieving sustainable energy yields benefits beyond the environment. It enables children to study at night, allows health clinics to store needed vaccines, and frees women from backbreaking chore and life-threatening smoke from wood-burning stoves. It creates a platform for better and more productive lives.

Read more: http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ourperspective/ourperspectivear...

In the face of unprecedented deforestation and biodiversity loss, policy makers are increasingly using financial incentives to encourage conservation.
However, a research team led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) revealed that in the long run, conservation incentives may struggle to compete with future agricultural yields.
Their findings were first published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 15 April 2013.

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130423102330.htm

This is part one of a two-part series on the limits of human economic growth on planet Earth. Part one details some of the environmental and natural resource challenges we’re up against.

Read more: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/04/17/the-limits-of-...

European funding to help poor countries adapt to a changing climate is dropping remarkably at a time when it needs to be scaled up in line with UN commitments and people are dealing with increasing impacts of extreme weather events.

As part of an assessment that shows significant cuts in development aid to poor nations, the OECD has just revealed that funding for programs mainly focused on helping developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change fell globally from $3.1 billion in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2011. Although the OECD has not yet released climate finance figures for 2012, research by Oxfam suggests that levels of public climate finance did not improve last year.

Read more: http://oxfameu.blogactiv.eu/2013/04/08/staggering-55-cut-to-eu-funding-f...

Floods are among the most common causes of disasters in cities. Many cities are built on rivers or on low-elevation sites on coasts so they’re vulnerable to flooding. As cities expand, so the increased building further limits natural drainage and can increase flood risks each time it rains heavily.

In the last year, the list of cities where serious floods and loss of life has occurred include Jakarta, Chittagong, Manila, Beijing, Krymsk, Buenos Aires, various cities in Nigeria, New York and other cities in the US, and the Caribbean which was hit by hurricane Sandy in October 2012. In 2011 floods in Thailand devastated Bangkok and many other Thai cities (and rural areas).

Read more: http://www.iied.org/how-does-changing-climate-impact-urban-poverty

Natural capital includes, first of all, the resources that we easily recognize and measure such as minerals and energy, forest timber, agricultural land, fisheries and water. It also includes ecosystems producing services that are often ‘invisible’ to most people such as air and water filtration, flood protection, carbon storage, pollination for crops, and habitat for fisheries and wildlife. These values are not readily captured in markets, so we don’t really know how much they contribute to the economy and livelihoods. We often take these services for granted and don’t know what it would cost if we lose them.

The concept of accounting for natural capital has been around for more than 30 years. However, progress in moving toward implementation has been slow.

A major step towards achieving this vision came recently with the adoption by the UN Statistical Commission of the System for Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA). The SEEA provides an internationally agreed method, on par with the current SNA, to account for material natural resources like minerals, timber, and fisheries. The challenge now is to build capacity in countries to implement the SEEA and to demonstrate its benefits to policy makers.

Read more: http://www.wavespartnership.org/waves/natural-capital-accounting

A top-level United Nations conference has, for the first time, laid the foundations for practical and proactive national drought policies to increase resilience to the world’s most destructive natural hazard, which is being aggravated by climate change.

The High-level Meeting on National Drought Policy marked the first globally-coordinated attempt to move towards science-based drought disaster risk reduction and break away from piecemeal and costly crisis-response, which often comes too late to avert death, displacement and destruction.

Read more: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/172030/icode/

The European commission on Wednesday called for merging the fight against poverty and environmental protection into a single framework for the future, casting itself as the "role model" for the world.

The commission's Decent Life for All by 2030 (pdf) communication outlines proposed negotiating positions on the successor to the UN millennium development goals (MDGs), the eight targets agreed in 2000 – with many likely to miss their 2015 target.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/27/eu-role-model-e...

The international society says mercury pollution is a major threat to the environment and has helped place it on the agenda of environment protection bodies across the globe.
In 2009, the United Nations Environment Program's 25th council moved to formally begin a global effort in mercury pollution control, stipulating that the UNEP would host five meetings with various governments between 2010 and 2013 to formulate a global legal convention on a range of efforts to control the toxic metal.

Read more: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-03/09/content_16293368.htm

The international society says mercury pollution is a major threat to the environment and has helped place it on the agenda of environment protection bodies across the globe.

In 2009, the United Nations Environment Program's 25th council moved to formally begin a global effort in mercury pollution control, stipulating that the UNEP would host five meetings with various governments between 2010 and 2013 to formulate a global legal convention on a range of efforts to control the toxic metal.

Read more: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-03/09/content_16293368.htm