Greening the Blue is a UNEP initiative to engage and support the un system in the transition towards greater environmental sustainability in the management of its facilities and operations.
The 2022 edition of the Report reveals the UN system accelerated efforts on environmental governance and environmental training in 2021. It highlights the 2021 environmental impacts of 307,000 personnel in 53 reporting entities across Headquarters, field offices and operations on the ground. It is composed of the 2021 data highlights, which are based on UN system-wide results, as well as more dynamic individual entity information that is provided by the Report’s data tables and entity-specific webpages.
In alignment with Strategy for Sustainability Management in the United Nations 2020-2030, Phase I: Environmental Sustainability in the Area of Management, the Report provides UN system-wide and entity-level data on environmental impact areas: greenhouse gas emissions, climate neutrality, waste, air
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly seen as a way to meet the objectives of several global agreements and can be central to a just transition – if the right mix of just transition policies are implemented. But there is currently no guarantee that NbS will generate decent work.
Co-developed by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is the first in a joint global biennial report series that aims to fill knowledge and advocacy gaps on how transitions to a green economy will affect the world of work, and of the role that NbS can and do play in creating employment, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable people.
For farmers like Teia Fava, finance can play a significant role in the ability to expand commodity production in a forest-positive way.
“Every rural producer wants to broaden their production and increase the yield per hectare, and of course, there are more efficient and nature-positive models to do so.” Said Fava, who works as a businesswoman and producer on a farm in the Mato Grosso province of Brazil. However, she identifies challenges faced by producers seeking to shift production models to be nature-positive, “but it requires funding and infrastructure change.”
Fava’s firsthand experience illustrates the paradox of current commodity production models; humans depend on the wide range of ecological services that forests provide, yet they are destroying forests to grow food. Agriculture is the leading driver of global deforestation, and an increasing demand for food and agricultural products, especially animal proteins, is expected to drive deforestation in the coming
UNEP FI, together with the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and the Finance for Biodiversity Foundation, have invited financial institutions to sign a statement calling for an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to be adopted at COP15 in Montreal, Canada.
The official press release will be available here on 13 December 2022.
View the full statement here.
For more information, head here.
The second edition of the State of Finance for Nature report launched today reveals that nature-based solutions are still significantly under-financed. If the world wants to halt biodiversity loss, limit climate change to below 1.5C and achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030, current finance flows to NbS must urgently double by 2025 and triple by 2030. Delayed action is not an option in the face of the devastating effects of climate change, the extinction crisis, and severe land degradation globally.
The first edition of the report indicated that annual investments in nature-based solutions will have to triple by 2030 and increase four-fold by 2050 from the current investments into nature-based solutions of USD 133 billion (using 2020 as the base year).