All publications and documents

US cities are at the forefront of the sustainable development challenge. They contain 80% of the country’s population, and therefore have the capacity to make or break SDG achievement (US Census Bureau 2016). But, while crucial to SDG attainment, they Executive Summary cannot accomplish this alone. While 80 percent of US residents live in urban areas, only 3 percent of land is urban; rural and…

The Sustainable Development Report 2019 – Mediterranean Countries Edition is a synthetic review of the fourth edition of the Sustainable Development Report 2019, including integrated contents and tables editing, specifically focusing on 23 Mediterranean countries. It was drafted by a team of experts of the University of Siena – Santa Chiara Lab, as hosting institution of the Sustainable…

The challenge of land degradation Sustainable land use is closely connected with many sustainable development objectives Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN).  It is estimated that two billion hectares of land is degraded worldwide, and we continue to degrade another 12 million hectares of productive land every year. According to the 2018 World Atlas of Desertification produced by the…

UBS Global Wealth Management launched the white paper titled, ‘Awareness, Simplification, and Contribution,’ which sets out ways to ensure that more private capital goes towards addressing the SDGs, in an accelerated manner. The paper was presented by UBS Chair Axel Weber, who argued that the SDGs can only be achieved by raising awareness and channeling personal preferences for investing…

More than a quarter of the world's forest area is located in drylands, and trees are present on almost a third of the world's dryland regions, according to Trees, forests and land use in drylands: The first global assessment, launched by FAO today at the High-Level Meeting on Forests at the U.N. COP25 climate summit. The results "demonstrate that drylands are not wastelands, but…

There is a nexus between forest accounting and sustainable development. Forests are a valuable resource as they constitute an important component of the terrestrial environmental system and larger resource base. They provide different basic inputs to the global economic cum ecological system in a multi-dimensional way. They provide timber, fuel, pulpwood, fodder, fibre grass and non-wood forest…