The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and the services that they provide us while enhancing food production. This challenge for developing countries confronts the force of economic globalization, which seeks cropland that is shrinking in availability and triggers deforestation. Four mechanisms—the displacement, rebound, cascade, and …
The Japanese Satoumi concept of managing coastal resources depends crucially on the bottom-up involvement of local communities. http://icsf.net/icsf2006/uploads/publications/samudra/pdf/english/issue_58/art01.pdf
Around half of the world’s population depends directly or indirectly on mountain resources for different products and services. Having a means for economic valuation of these services will help increase recognition of their value and provide a way of ensuring fair distribution of the costs and benefits of conservation and …
The Compendium on Capacity for Implementing Land Based Mitigation has been produced in response to an identified demand from Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and other country officials for greater information on national policy contexts regarding the inclusion of land in the climate change solution.
WORLD leaders trying to mitigate the effects of depleting biodiversity of various ecosystems have a reason to worry. Loss of biodiversity may make organisms, including humans, more vulnerable to infectious diseases and influence emergence of new illnesses. That is the conclusion of a paper which stated animals, plants and microbes …
The National Mission for a Green India has been approved by the PM’s Council on Climate Change. It aims to increase the quantity and quality of 10 million ha. of forest area, achieving an annual CO2 sequestration of 50 to 60M tonnes by 2020. The National Mission for a Green …
This document is designed to inform decision makers about additional opportunities to slow the observed rate of climate change and at the same time achieve air quality benefits over the next two to four decades. This can be realised by implementing measures to reduce atmospheric levels of methane, black carbon …
In an unprecedented response to the rapid decline in wild tiger populations, the Heads of Government of the 13 tiger range countries endorsed the St. Petersburg Declaration in November 2010, pledging to double the wild tiger population. We conducted a landscape analysis of tiger habitat to determine if a recovery …
The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India (GOI) has been asked to identify ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs) along the Western Ghats, and to suggest how to manage them. The concept of ESAs has been extensively discussed in the literature. Several …
The study from March 2011 to February 2012 in the Tanguar haor, Sunamgonj, Bangladesh found three habitat types of vegetation composition as upland, emergent and aquatic which included submerged plants (23), free floating plants (12), rooted floating plants (21), sedges and meadows (35), reed swamp (7), freshwater swamp forest (9), …
The Asia-Pacific region is home to over 900 million poor. Most are in rural areas and there is considerable overlap with forest areas. As such, the forestry sector developments are intimately engaged with poverty issues.
Global population growth exerts stresses on river basins that provide food, water, energy and other ecosystem services. In some basins, evidence is emerging of failures to satisfy these demands. This paper assembles data from nine river basins in a framework that relates water and food systems to development. The framework …
Big river basins are complex systems of people and nature. This article explores the resilience of nine case studies of big river basins. A system description and generic conceptual model suggests that resilience to changes in water quantity is critical. When water becomes limiting, the social-ecological system must adapt rapidly …
The global food system will experience an unprecedented combination of pressures over the next 40 years. Global population size looks likely to increase from nearly seven billion today to over nine billion by 2050. Competition for land, water and energy will intensify, while the effects of climate change will become …
This book released recently by the Wotld Bank contends that most countries are relatively highly dependent on natural capital initially, and the ones that progress most successfully are those that manage their assets for the long term and reinvest in human and social capital as well as in building strong …
Although ecological restoration is widely used to combat environmental degradation, very few studies have evaluated the cost-effectiveness of this approach. We examine the potential impact of forest restoration on the value of multiple ecosystem services across four dryland areas in Latin America, by estimating the net value of ecosystem service …
Quantitative scenarios are coming of age as a tool for evaluating the impact of future socioeconomic development pathways on biodiversity and ecosystem services. We analyze global terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biodiversity scenarios using a range of measures including extinctions, changes in species abundance, habitat loss, and distribution shifts, as well …
Current unprecedented declines in biodiversity reduce the ability of ecological communities to provide many fundamental ecosystem services. Here we evaluate evidence that reduced biodiversity affects the transmission of infectious diseases of humans, other animals and plants. In principle, loss of biodiversity could either increase or decrease disease transmission. However, mounting …
This report by the IES presents the findings of a study that explores the likely impacts of the recent proposals in India to build a dam at Pancheshwar in the Himalayas on the river ecosystems and the surrounding areas and people involved. This dam will be the world's second tallest …
UNESCO as an agency of United Nations has been active in capacity building in basic sciences, environmental and earth sciences as well as science policy, and has helped to launch many global programmes, among these some relating to biotechnology, biosphere reserves, biodiversity and sustainable development.
