A new special report released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that better land management is necessary to tackle climate change, raising urgency about the need for more collective action to ensure the world’s forests, farms, and other landscapes are protected and developed in a sustainable way.
Inaugural Finance for Adaptation Solutions & Technologies Roundtable (FASTR) event
A number of public and private institutions outlined new financings, projects, studies, risk analyses, measurement methodologies, and other initiatives for climate adaptation, paving the way for greater private sector action and investment in climate adaptation.
GEF approves $179 million to support FAO-led projects
FAO welcomed a decision by the Council of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to provide $179 million to support the UN agency's work with countries worldwide at the critical nexus between agriculture and the environment. This includes projects focused on biodiversity conservation, transboundary water resources management, sustainable land management, highly hazardous pesticide remediation, and climate change adaptation.
The World Day to Combat Desertification (WDCD), observed every year on June 17th, promotes public awareness of international efforts to combat land degradation. WDCD 2019 theme, “Let’s Grow the Future Together,” calls for the achievement of Land Degradation Neutrality through the involvement and cooperation of all levels of the global community.
Twenty-seven Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have come together in a bid to manage and eliminate toxic chemicals and waste in some of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems under a new initiative announced today in Washington DC.
New investments to help bring about transformational change in key economic systems
Governments from around the world have agreed a record programme of action aimed at bringing about transformational change around the world to address an unprecedented attack on the Earth's life-support systems.
CEO Naoko Ishii opens historic GEF Council
Humanity may be facing its “last chance” to save the Earth's natural environment and its own prosperity, Naoko Ishii, the CEO and Chairperson of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) told governments today.
She told the GEF's 56th Council meeting, in Washington DC, that challenges were “becoming bigger and bigger”, but that the world's ability to address them was “also becoming stronger”, presenting “an historic opportunity to come together to make a difference”.
Over 120 representatives from civil society, government, and the private sector convened at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Consultations with Civil Society to discuss how to address plastic pollution based on a circular economy approach.
Over the last two years pollution by plastics has caught the attention, and sparked the concern, of the world. What was for long seen as a marginal, local, and largely aesthetic issue – even by some environmentalists – is now established to be one of our greatest challenges.
It is increasingly recognised as one of the prime symbols of the world's throwaway 'linear' economy and of the need to replace it with a regenerative 'circular' one, through systems – rather than piecemeal - change.
