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Reducing forest cover, illegal logging and land degradation pose serious threat to the forests in the Caucasus and Central Asia. To address these issues forest sector needs a long term vision together with national strategies and action plans to support the sustainable management and use of…
Source: UNECE Statistical Database (www.unece.org/stats/data), Eurostat, CISSTAT and national statistics In 2015, in the United States gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 2.4 per cent compared to the previous year – the same growth rate as in 2014. In the European Union (EU), GDP…
The Eighth Environment for Europe Ministerial Conference will gather Ministers and high-level representatives of UNECE’s 56 member countries in Batumi, Georgia, from 8-10 June 2016. The main themes of the Conference will be: Greening the economy. This approach, which fosters a healthy…
It is commonly known that global exports exceed global imports. How is it possible? Is it due to the growing exports of goods to the moon? No, it is due to difficulties in capturing global production and trade flows.Businesses once largely confined their production activities to the national…
The UNECE’s international standards and recommendations in the areas of innovation and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) will make a strong contribution to the immense task of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This was the consensus of participants in the tenth…
Recent humanitarian crises combined with continuing globalization have brought the topic of international migration to the forefront of news reports around the world. The effects of cross-border migration are wide ranging and affect both migrants themselves and many non-migrants. As a result,…
How can innovation and Public-Private Partnerships contribute to implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development? This will be at the centre of the debates at the session of the UNECE Committee on Innovation, Competitiveness and Public-Private Partnerships (CICPPP), from 23 to 25 May at…
A decade of efforts by UNECE and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to support countries of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia to modernize the management of their water resources have paid off. Successes include the adoption of a water sector reform…
About half of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a direct focus on the environment and there is at least one target on environmental sustainability in each SDG. How the environmental community will work to achieve the SDGs will be the overarching theme of the second session of the…
UNECE, WTO and the Government of Turkmenistan brought together trade negotiators, vice ministers and other high-level officials from SPECA countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – as well as their neighbour, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to discuss four key…
A few months after the ground-breaking 2030 Agenda entered into effect, governments and other actors across the region are gearing up to turn the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into reality. It became clear at this week’s Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, held in the framework of…
Experts from the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand recently translated the United Nations Framework Classification for Fossil Energy and Mineral Reserves and Resources 2009 (UNFC) into Thai. A copy of the publication in Thai…
Hazardous wastes contain chemicals, heavy metals, dangerous pathogens, or other substances of concern that make them, inter alia, explosive, flammable, infectious or toxic. The movement of such wastes pose serious risks to human health and the environment.The Basel Convention on the Control of…
Discussing the sustainability credentials of natural gas might not be the first thing that comes to one’s mind on International Mother Earth Day. But this is nevertheless what happened on 22 April, underlining the importance of the topic debated by the UNECE Group of Experts on Gas.The share of…
Miracle seeds, power food or “poor man’s meat” as they are sometimes called – pulses (beans, lentils, chickpeas and more) are the super food that we have certainly all eaten - but which many of us have never heard of. Perhaps this is why the United Nations General Assembly named 2016…
Used approximately 1.5 billion times per year in international trade transactions for goods, the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LOCODE) plays an essential role in international trade. UN/LOCODE is also used in international transactions for trade in services and at…
The development plans in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, the countries that share the Drina Basin, need to be assessed for their impact on the ecosystems but also across sectors, in particular energy, agriculture and water management. These plans include some 20 new hydropower…
We are all more or less familiar with the concept of inflation - rising prices that reduce our purchasing power. The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure of consumer price inflation. It measures the average price change of goods and services purchased by households for…
Institutional reform in the water sector in Armenia will reach a new milestone in 2017 with the enactment of provisions on drinking water. As a result, a single water service operator will be chosen to supply drinking water for the entire country, instead of the five separate companies operating…
The role of trade as a powerful engine for development is well recognised, including within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Electronic business tools and trade facilitation have a key supporting role to play by providing effective, efficient and accessible solutions to…
Most of us probably still remember the time when during a family car trip the hard-to-fold windshield-sized paper map was drawn out to determine which way to turn next, or when everyone in the back seat was instructed to keep their eyes open for the next gas station. Now, many of us are used to…
Ever growing energy security, environmental and sustainability concerns means that countries and conventional oil and gas companies are increasingly looking to manage their energy portfolio as a mix of conventional and renewable resources. Classification of renewable energy resources, as well as…
Energy impacts every aspect of our lives and underpins the Sustainable Development Goals – yet energy remains a vast and complex subject. An acclaimed online project embraced by both environmental groups and the energy industry, the SWITCH Energy Project, provides a balanced and pragmatic…
While emissions of key air pollutants have been reduced considerably over the past few decades as a result of integrated air pollution management strategies developed under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (Air Convention), progress has been uneven across the UNECE region…
Experts from UNECE member States and the secretariat will be visiting Bulgaria from 11 to 21 April 2016 for a field mission in the framework of the third environmental performance review (EPR) of the country. The team will meet governmental officials and representatives of international…