About one-third of food produced for human consumption gets lost or is wasted globally. This amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year, the equivalent of six to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions generated by human beings. This and many more quick facts on the links between agriculture and climate change can be found in a set of “Big Facts” released on 30 November by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

The suite of 30 key facts, based on scientific papers, features colourful infographics and photographs from the field. The facts cover everything from undernourishment and population to forestry and fisheries, integrating the latest and most authoritative research on the relevant topics.

Visit the website – http://ccafs.cgiar.org/bigfacts/

Reported in IRIN, 30 November 2012

“CleanStart – Microfinance Opportunities for a Clean Energy Future” is joint product of the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and UNDP.

CleanStart is a new programme to help poor households and micro-entrepreneurs access financing from microfinance institutions coupled with technical assistance for low-cost clean energy applications. CleanStart promotes appropriate financing arrangements, supports quality assurance measures for end users, and addresses key gaps in energy value chains to contribute to a mutually beneficial cycle of investment and building awareness, as well as create a new market segment with higher returns for participating institutions.

This publication shares the experience of UNCDF and UNDP in designing the CleanStart approach, which has already been launched in Nepal and a CleanStart assessment mission was recently undertaken in Uganda.

Link: http://www.uncdf.org/sites/default/files/Download/cleanstart.pdf

On May 11, the UN Committee on Food Security will vote on voluntary guidelines to govern the practice of land tenuring. Ahead of that decision, a coalition of NGOs has released Land Matrix, a data visualization tool that helps paint a more complete picture of an issue that’s become increasingly important in many parts of the developing world over the past four to five years.

Also known as land grabbing, land tenuring involves acquiring land at low prices and using it to fuel food and cash crop production, the creation of biofuels or forestry. Data on exactly how much land has been purchased is hard to come by, although a 2010 World Bank report suggests it could as much as twice the amount we’re aware of.

View the Land Matrix at http://landportal.info/landmatrix

Source: UN Dispatch

India’s economic growth and political stability are at stake in coming years if it does not change its approach to water management, a member of its natural resources planning commission told Reuters-AlertNet.

Mihir Shah, who has been asked by India’s government to come up with a new water resource strategy, said the sector needed to become more  sustainable, efficient and focused on how water is used and how it reaches people.

“If this is not attended to, India’s growth story will completely go off the rails,” Shah said during an interview at the Global Water Summit 2012 conference in Rome.

Read the full report on AlertNet

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s Natural Resources Management and Environment Department has released a new website called "Sustainability Pathways". This website hosts projects under development that looks at some aspects of sustainability, such as:How do we define and measure sustainability in the food and agriculture sector? Check the SAFA project and e-Forum;

• In a choc scenario such as high energy price, could organic livestock systems meet consumption demands sustainably? Check the SOL project;
• How could producers be best rewarded for environmental stewardship? Check the PES project;
• What is the environmental footprint of the food loss and waste and could it be reduced? Check the FWF project and database;
• What are the agriculture, forestry and fisheries issues in the global move towards a green economy? Check the GEA project.

It also feature relevant FAO publications and partnerships, as well as a list of interesting meetings: http://www.fao.org/nr/sustainability/

The carbon map: Making sense of climate change responsibility and vulnerability

An interesting infographic video of “responsibility” for climate change and its resultant “vulnerability” – so who should actually be doing what?!

via The carbon map: making sense of climate change responsibility and vulnerability.

Poor roads and transport infrastructure are key factors in the
marginalization of women and other disempowered groups, but there is
little understanding of the many ways in which a lack of mobility
affects people’s lives. In South-east Asia, huge strides are being made
in highway development and regional economic integration, and the
connections between mobility and livelihood are extremely dynamic. The
complex interplay of factors makes these connections both interesting
and challenging for study. Do roads necessarily bring economic
opportunities and prosperity? How does the possible change in mobility
transform the lives of women and marginalized groups? How does the
differential impact of these changes on people depend on geographical,
social, and historical factors and people’s own capacities to make
optimum use of the new resource?

Gender, Roads, and Mobility in Asia is a collection of case-based
research in developing countries exploring the inter-relations between
gender, poverty, and mobility, especially in the context of
transportation development. It brings together stories from different
points of transformation and what emerges is a nuanced picture of how
people’s own positions and capabilities – gender, age, ethnicity,
literacy, and education – influence the impact of the infrastructure
development on their lives.

This book should be read by policy makers, transportation planners,
development practitioners and researchers, undergraduates,
postgraduates, and academics in the areas of gender and development
studies and transportation planning and management.

To purchase the book, please visit: http://developmentbookshop.com/gender-roads-and-mobility-in-asia.html

FAO has released a new short document entitled, “100 days to Rio +20, 100 facts: Making the link between people, food and the environment” . The 8-page document is a quick read, and covers facts on a number of topics, including – hunger, water, forestry, gender, fisheries, land, food, nature and the environment.

Some excerpts:

4. Malnutrition is the single largest contributor to disease in the world. In developing countries, almost five million children under the age of five die of malnutrition-related causes every year.

12. The amount of food wasted by consumers in industrialised countries each year (222m tons) is almost as high as the total net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230m tons).

28. 28  Number of countries that are withdrawing 20 percent of their water resources annually, indicating substantial pressure and impending water scarcity: 8

36. Deforestation affected an estimated 13 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2010; net forest loss was 5.2 million hectares per year, due to afforestation and natural expansion.

46.  In sub-Saharan Africa women contribute between 60 and 80 percent of the labour for food production, both for household consumption and for sale.

53. Fish contributes to food security in many regions of the world. Numerous developing countries rely on fish as a major source of protein; in 28 of them, fish accounts for over 40 percent of animal protein intake.

70. Arable land per person is shrinking. It decreased from 0.38 hectares in 1970 to 0.23 hectares in 2000, with a projected decline to 0.15 hectares per person by 2050.

85. Overall, post-harvest food losses can run from 15 percent of food production to as high as 50 percent. These losses are due to a variety of reasons, including harvesting at an incorrect stage of produce maturity, excessive exposure to rain, drought or extremes of temperature, contamination by micro-organisms and physical damage.

97. Agriculture and deforestation account for about one third of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, specifically 25 percent of carbon, 50 percent of methane and over 75 percent of nitrous oxide.

Read the full document of 100 faxts

The latest issue of the Economist magazine has an article on the threat from rising water and sinking buildings.

IT IS the peak of the rainy season in Indonesia: good for farmers, but not so welcome for the 9m or so citizens of Jakarta. They hope to dodge the “five-year curse”. In 2007 flooding inundated nearly three-fifths of the capital, killing 52 people, displacing some 450,000 more and costing nearly $1 billion. Five years before that floodwaters killed about 60 residents and forced 365,000 from their homes.

Read the full article: http://www.economist.com/node/21550322

In the architecture and construction industry, the sustainability of a building is often calculated using tools that reduce the meaning of the concept to a set of numbers. To re-energise the idea of sustainable construction, the Holcim Foundation proposes five qualitative measures that will help make a building truly endure.

1. Progress: innovation and transferability
2. Planet: environmental quality and resource efficiency
3. People:  ethical standards and social equity
4. Prosperity: economic performance and compatibility
5. Proficiency: contextual and aesthetic impact

Read full article

Sustainable Business

New book:
Business and Climate Policy: The Potentials and Pitfalls of Private Voluntary Programs
Edited by Karsten Ronit

Climate change has become one of the most important and challenging global policy fields. Attention has primarily focused on the successes and failures of states and intergovernmental organizations but many more actors are involved and contribute to solutions. Business, often seen as spurring climate change, harbours a lot of potential for problem solving. Today, a rich variety of private voluntary programs address climate change.

Private voluntary programs are private in the sense that they are initiated by and made up of businesses, voluntary in the sense that businesses are free to join or leave them, and programs in that a variety of formal rules, resources and bodies are often established to administer and evaluate the schemes.

Further information on the book from United Nations University

Urban Environmental Management:
Considering the challenges of limited oil resources, increasing energy prices, climate change, environmental pollution and health risks, it is essential to establish an efficient transport system that meets demand, but consumes as little energy as possible.

The new SUTP Sourcebook Module entitled  “Urban Transport and Energy Efficiency” serves as a navigator for decision makers and stakeholders, including local and national authorities, the private sector and non-governmental organisations. It provides a comprehensive overview of measures and policies designed to promote greater energy efficiency in transport, and assigns specific tasks and responsibilities to particular parties. Case studies illustrate international experiences in implementing measures to increase energy efficiency in transport.

The 88-page, full-colour document, authored by  Susanne Böhler-Baedeker and Hanna Hüging is available for download here (7.6 Mb) – New users may need to register first and then proceed for download.

Dramatic before-after photos of the recovery and reconstruction that has been happening one year after the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Follow this link and click on each “After photo” to see the “Before” situation at the same location.

A strong sustainability agenda, covering economic, environmental and social issues, is no longer an afterthought, done by a stand-alone unit, or limited to planting trees.

According to a recent MIT Sloan School of Management study, most managers surveyed in the worldwide research firmly believe that a sustainable strategy is a *competitive necessity*

The study saw an increase in the sustainability commitments of companies, with both internal and external factors driving sustainable business practices.

Read an extended summary and/or download the report  at: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/feature/sustainability-strategy/

With a very diverse range of cultures and geographical features, the Asia-Pacific Region is 42.2% urbanized, with half of the world’s urban population now in Asia-Pacific. Cities in the region are home to 1.76 billion people – 12 out of 21 mega cities (with more than 10 million residents) are in Asia-Pacific.

These and other interesting information,covering a wide range of issues and themes, are part of the recently released report, “The State of Asian Cities 2010/11″ by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia Pacific (UN-ESCAP) and United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT).

The full report can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=3078

Over the last many years, Prof. David Edgell, Professor of Tourism at East Carolina University, has been compiling an interesting list of "Ten Important World Tourism Issues" for the forthcoming year. His latest list, for 2012:

1. Repercussions on the travel and tourism industry from the global economic slowdown   
2. Concern for safety and security remains an important issue for the travel industry
3. The transformative impact tourism has on global socio-economic progress
4. Negative impact on the travel industry of increases in fuel prices and airline fees
5. Importance of maintaining a  destination’s social, cultural, natural and built resources
6. Effect on tourism from natural and man-made disasters and world political disruptions
7. Influence of increased use of electronic and other technologies on the travel industry
8. Changes in tourism demand resulting from increased travel by emerging nations
9. Greater interest in potential long term consequences of climate change on tourism
10. Need for increased national/local leadership in tourism policy and strategic planning

The list was developed using information from university discussions, conferences and seminars, tourism documents, surveys, industry data, books, articles, and publications, and utilization of a modified Delphi approach in gathering certain research information and obtaining a consensus viewpoint.

FOUR out of five Latin Americans live in cities, compared with fewer than half of Asians or Africans. The region’s 198 biggest cities—those with more than 200,000 people—account for 60% of its economic output, with the ten largest alone generating half of that. The productivity gains that flow from bringing people together in cities have been one of the drivers of economic growth in Latin America over the past half century or more. But congestion, housing shortages, pollution and a lack of urban planning mean that Latin America’s biggest cities now risk dragging down their country’s economies.

Read the full article – http://www.economist.com/node/21525915?fsrc=scn%2Fcitylimitslatinamerica
Source: The Economist magazine

Abdul Bayes, a professor of economics at Jahangirnagar University in
Bangladesh, recently argued in Bangladeshi newspaper The Financial
Express that non-government organizations (NGOs) have improved the
credit market in rural Bangladesh by increasing