For most of their life, Valentina Zhakupbekova and her family have depended on Kazakhstan’s vast wetlands to survive. Her husband helped support their family of four children with the fish he caught until he passed away. Left without a job and with a family to feed, she learned about a GEF/UNDP workshop that taught how to create felt textile products made from wool, a commodity in abundant supply in her town.
By Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre
Geologists rarely make headlines. But this month the word ‘Anthropocene’ flooded the media following an intervention by scientists at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town. Since 2009, they have been poring over the evidence to work out whether the Earth has slipped abruptly and unexpectedly into a new geological epoch.
They reached a startling conclusion: Earth has left the cosy confines of the epoch we humans know, love and absolutely depend upon – the Holocene.
By Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Caroline Zimm
2015 marked a historic turning point. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) unanimously adopted by the United Nations last September provide an aspirational narrative and specific targets for human development: a world free from hunger, injustice and absolute poverty; a world with universal education, health and employment; a world with inclusive economic growth, based on transparency, dignity and equity.
In Almaty, the residents of a 56-apartment building built in the 1960s are happier because they can finally be more comfortable in wintertime.
“But it was not always the case," said Ms. Irina Valyshova of the Maksat CAO Residents Association. "I used to receive complaints everyday because the apartments were too hot or too cold, and because the energy bills were rising.”
By Thomas Lovejoy, professor of environmental science and policy, United Nations Foundation
Humans are a curious species. We are remarkably adept at manipulating, even more so at communicating and thinking symbolically and analytically. The result is a multicultural fount of intellectual products - scientific, artistic, humanistic and more – all fostered by our innate social primate nature.
By Mark Malloch-Brown, chair of the Business and Sustainable Development Commission
Mid 2016 may be remembered as the summer of globalisation’s discontent, one that has arguably been decades in the making. Though it helped bring about a golden era of growth, trade, and foreign direct investment, globalisation has not benefited society equitably, and it has forged ahead at calamitous expense to the environment.
By Dominic Waughray, Head of Public Private Cooperation, World Economic Forum, and Visiting Scholar, Stanford University Woods Institute for the Environment
Naoko Ishii, CEO and chairperson of the Global Environment Facility, tells Geoffrey Lean of new priorities for her organisation and the world economy that conform to the sustainable development goals
We know about the “tragedy of the commons”, but how about the opportunity it presents? The crisis facing the ultimate global commons – the very conditions that make human civilisation and economic prosperity possible – confronts us with the necessity of making our societies and economies more sustainable and less inequitable.
Indigenous and traditional communities everywhere have special relationships with the natural environment they live in. Fishermen, cattle-breeders, farmers, they rely on land and water for their livelihoods. Drastic changes in climate have devastating impact on their lives and adapting to them is especially difficult if a community lives in a war-torn country like Afghanistan.
After the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railway in 2006 the rapid increase in tourism in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau caused a significant increase in waste generation. This threatened both the grassland ecology of the plateau and the water quality of the Yangtze River. In an investigation, conducted by the Green River Environmental Protection Association, to study waste disposal and pollution trends at the source of the Yangtze River they found that waste was primarily thrown away or burnt in the open air.
