The focus of this publication is efficient water use in urban and domestic environments and decision-making about sustainable development of human settlements. The book is written as a Sourcebook, highlighting essential questions that will have different answers in different situations.
UNEP has more than twenty years of experience working on climate change. UNEP helped establish the IPCC with the WMO in the 1980s and conducted assessments of the scientific understanding of climate change in preparation for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development. UNEP also supported the negotiation of the UNFCCC, which entered into force in 1994.
There is mounting evidence that climate change is triggering a shrinking and thinning of many glaciers world-wide which may eventually put at risk water supplies for hundreds of millions
Reforming environmentally harmful energy subsidies will need to play a central role in moving the world onto a more sustainable development path. Consensus on the detrimental impact of rising fossil-energy consumption on climate change now calls for renewed attention and urgency of the reform process. This report summarises the issues and challenges in removing or modifying subsidies on energy that undermine the pursuit of sustainable development.
Many countries are currently looking at growing high-yielding crops for the production of biofuels as alternatives to traditional fuels (petrol and diesel) to address imminent
energy shortages and reduce impacts of climate change. This usually involves the importation of foreign (i.e., alien) species of plants that are known for their fast and
Climate change is presenting a further and wide-ranging challenge with new and emerging threats to the sustainability and productivity of a key economic and environmental resource. This report attempts to focus the numerous impacts on the marine environment in order to assess how multiple stresses including climate change might shape the marine world over the coming years and decades.
