All results

Filter by:

Showing 1291-1300 of 7970 results

On World Wetlands Day, the world’s 'Great Lakes' are Exhibit A for why wetlands matter: Ted Lawrence

It might not be grabbing headlines around the globe, but tomorrow's U.N. World Wetlands Day matters. Wetlands across the globe provide many services, from improving water quality and protecting from floods and droughts, to providing habitats for countless flora and fauna, much of which we depend on. More broadly, World Wetlands Day accords us a rare and precious opportunity to celebrate North America’s abundant — but certainly not infinite — freshwater supplies.
IISD in the news February 1, 2023

Downscaling global land-use/cover change scenarios for regional analysis of food, energy, and water subsystems

Food, energy, and water are essential for life. In modern society, it is difficult to imagine describing the process by which essential nutrients move from the earth to the ordinary person’s dinner plate without speaking anything of energy being used to make fertilizer, water being pumped to irrigate cropland, or fuel being used to move food to the grocery store. The interactions among food, energy, and water (FEW) in the face of scarcity define the FEW nexus (Hoff, 2011). Over the last decade, nexus thinking has become the paradigm for discussion around sustainable development and resource security on the global stage (Leck et al., 2015). Examples include the World Economic Forum’s Water Initiative report (WEF Water Initiative, 2011), the International Institute for Sustainable Development report on FEW security (Bizikova et al., 2013), and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (Weitz, 2014).
IISD in the news January 30, 2023

The world loses when Big Oil holds all the cards

Imagine that the future of civilization is being decided at a poker table. The four players are the chairman of ExxonMobil, the distinguished climate scientist James Hansen, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and the mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, one of America's most flood-prone cities.
IISD in the news January 29, 2023

Health in global biodiversity governance: what is next?

The dependency of human health and wellbeing on nature is documented across disciplines, regions, cultures, and economies. Environmental degradation contributes substantially to the global burden of disease and concurrent global environmental changes are increasingly recognised as public health threats, worldwide. The 196 parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have called for increased engagement on biodiversity and health since 2014, while calls from stakeholders for integrated decision making are similarly long standing. Yet few civil society health organisations have historically engaged with the CBD and its intergovernmental negotiating process. This situation is, however, changing. In 2022, civil society health professionals and organisations were involved in the CBD agenda-setting (intersessional subsidiary body) and decision-making (Conference of the Parties [COP]) meetings. Five civil society health organisations attended the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in Montréal, Canada, as newly accredited delegations to the CBD. The new participation of these organisations in global biodiversity governance embodies the interdisciplinary work needed to take a whole-of-society approach to respecting planetary boundaries and prioritising the environmental determinants of health. The agenda of the UN CBD recognises and increasingly includes health. Now is the time to mobilise contributions from diverse health experts to inform integrated policy.
IISD in the news January 26, 2023

Achieving Sustainable Food Systems in a Global Crisis: Summary Report

This report summarizes the evidence-based and costed country roadmaps for effective public interventions to transform agriculture and food systems in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria in a way that ends hunger, makes diets healthier and more affordable, improves the productivity and incomes of small-scale producers and their households, and mitigates and adapts to climate change.
Report January 26, 2023

Latest IISD Coffee Report Calls for More Price Transparency

Current approaches to coffee pricing and value distribution in the global coffee market are unsustainable and present a lack of long-term resiliency in the coffee industry, according to the latest coffee market report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).
IISD in the news January 24, 2023