UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Wu Hongbo, in an editorial in the ‘Huffington Post,’ has outlined next steps following on the outcome of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20), which concluded a year earlier in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The Urban World 2030 Workshop: Sustainable Transport for Global Development and Climate Protection 2013 was co-organized by Atlantic Council, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT) on April 9th in Washington DC.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UNEP Risø Centre (URC) December’s newsletter includes stories on the Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) project and electrification in Africa, including efforts within the Sustainable Energy For All Initiative (SE4ALL). The newsletter also features several stories on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), including capacity building projects in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) region.
The workshop examined approaches to ensure that smallholders are not marginalized by increasing biofuel production for aviation. IFAD highlighted a $12 million initiative on research and development of alternative crops for smallholder biofuel production. They also underscored recent research grants that will help to produce biofuels sustainably.
The World Bank and the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) sustainable transport center, EMBARQ, will co-host the 10th annual “Transforming Transportation” event on sustainable transport. The 2013 agenda will discuss, inter alia: capitalizing on the multilateral development banks’ $175 billion commitment for sustainable transport made during Rio+20; opportunities for sustainable transport in China, India and Latin America; integrating urban transport and development; improving transport health and safety in cities; and bringing shared bicycle solutions to scale in developing countries.
The reports highlight that improving energy efficiency in operations, products and services, and the increased use of renewable energy are key priority action areas for business to support the UN Secretary-General’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative, while they also emphasize that industry-wide standards should be developed as well as new financing mechanisms to overcome risks associated with the suggested action areas.