Library

Building on a wide range of case studies, global empirical analyses, and modeling exercises, Lifelines lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure. Lifelines conclude by identifying five obstacles to resilient infrastructure and offering concrete recommendations and specific actions that can be taken by governments, stakeholders, and the international community to improve the quality and resilience of these essential services, and thereby contribute to more resilient and prosperous societies.

The Nature-based Solutions Toolkit captures more than 100 tools and resources on nature-based solutions that can support national decision-makers as they enhance their NDCs. 

This toolkit includes spatial datasets, reports, policy briefs, guidance documents, handbooks, other toolkits, and platforms on NBS for climate mitigation and adaptation.

This short guidance for government stakeholders on conducting a gender analysis for NDCs explains how the analysis should provide recommendations on gender-responsive policy alignment, institutional coordination, capacity building, sex-disaggregated data collection, and finance into the priority NDC sectors.

Published by WRI and UNDP, Enhancing NDCs: A Guide to Strengthening National Climate Plans is designed to help practitioners think through how to structure their country’s enhanced NDCs across three dimensions: 

1. Strengthening targets to reduce emissions (mitigation), 

2. Enhancing climate resilience (adaptation) and 

3. Clearly communicating their actions to build trust and facilitate effective implementation.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been working together since 2014 to support countries in developing Nationally Determined Contributions – or NDCs – beginning with the launch of a regional NDC dialogue series that just completed its 22nd event having engaged over 2,200 participants from over 150 developing countries. This report, leveraging those relationships and history, is the most detailed review yet of momentum since the Paris Agreement and is designed to both inspire and inform the UN Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September.

This voluntary guideline focuses on the design and effective implementation of ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, for consideration by the Subsidiary Body on Scientific Technical and Technological Advice prior to the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties.

This Research and Policy Brief is based on discussions at the Expert Group Meeting “Transformative Adaptation: Tackling the Root Causes of Vulnerability to Climate Change in Southeast Asian Coastal Cities that was held in Geneva on 21-22 November 2018 and funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.

This report, by the Just Transition Research Collaborative (JTRC), unpacks the different understandings, narratives, and framings of Just Transition that underpin the concept’s growing popularity and uptake. Six short country case studies then provide insights into how Just Transition is—or is not—being mobilized on the ground.

This brief was presented during the Transformative Adaptation in Coastal Cities workshop on 23–24 June 2019 in Bonn, Germany. 

This document focuses on how IAEA has been building Member States’ capacities to study and understand the effects of climate change on their soil and water resources.

This Strategic Plan shows how WIPO contributes to accelerating the transition to a greener global economy.

This impact story shows how Green School collaborated with Zero Mass Water in bringing SOURCE Hydropanels to supply Green School’s Bali campus with drinking water.

This impact story shows Cubo and Susteq plan to bring safe drinking water to over 20,000 beneficiaries in Nigeria and Kenya by 2019, with the possibility to extend their impact in countries like Senegal and India in the near future.

This report takes a comprehensive approach by covering the social impacts of climate change and related ICT-based responses, in addition to those focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas and carbon footprint impacts.

The objectives of this study is to:

– Test the set of U4SSC initiative indicators in the context of a Swiss city, in order to evaluate its suitability for measuring the level of digitalization and sustainable development.

– Evaluate the strengths of this system of indicators and identify any areas for improvement.

– For Pully, to profit from this exercise, in order to find its place within this system of indicators and evaluate its use over the long-term as a contribution to the management of the city.

This call to action is a result of the 9th Green Standards Week held in 1-4 October 2019 in Valencia, Spain. Participants discussed the opportunities that smart sustainable cities bring and acknowledged that the transition to smart sustainable cities is the cornerstone of achieving the SDGs.

This document was produced as a result of the 13th Symposium on ICT, Environment and Climate Change, which was held on 13 May 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The aim of the GLO is to communicate and raise awareness of evidence-based, policy-relevant information and trends to a variety of stakeholders, including national governments formulating their responses to commitments to better manage and restore land resources, including the SDGs and associated targets, such as Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). The evidence presented in the Global Land Outlook thematic regional reports demonstrates that informed and responsible decision-making can if more widely adopted help to reverse the current worrying trends in the state of our land resources.

The UNCCD-SPI technical report “Realising the Carbon Benefits of Sustainable Land Management Practices: Guidelines for Estimation of Soil Organic Carbon in the Context of Land Degradation” provides decision guidance for the estimation of soil organic carbon (SOC) in support of appropriate deployment of sustainable land management (SLM) technologies, in order to maintain or increase carbon in the soil and contribute to the achievement of land degradation neutrality (LDN). The report was produced to support the need for policy tools that provide guidance on harmonized methods for accurate estimations of changes in soil (SOC) stocks resulting from SLM interventions.

The UNCCD-SPI technical report “Creating an Enabling Environment for LDN and its Potential Contribution to Enhancing Well-being, Livelihoods and the Environment” provides science-based evidence on the potential contribution of LDN to enhancing the well-being and livelihoods as well as the environmental conditions of people affected by desertification/land degradation and drought. This is done by capturing evidence on the configuration of an enabling environment for LDN drawn from the scientific literature, the outcomes of the LDN target setting programme, and the experiences of individual stakeholders directly involved in LDN initiatives gathered through a global LDN survey.