UNEP - UN Environment Programme
UNEP is the leading environmental authority in the United Nations system.
About
UNEP’s mission is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling countries and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations. Its work is categorized into seven broad, cross cutting thematic areas: climatic change, disasters and conflicts, ecosystem management, environmental governance, chemicals and waste, resource efficiency and environment under review.
UN Environment believes that understanding the connections between resilience and resource efficiency helps cities in developing integrated solutions towards sustainable urbanization. It reinforces the need for horizontal (across sectors) integration and vertical (across different levels of governance) collaboration to harness benefits for people and the planet. Linking both concepts also supports countries in achieving the different milestone agreements that were recently concluded: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement, and the New Urban Agenda, all of which recognized the critical role of urbanization and action at the city-level.
The New Urban Agenda explicitly identifies the pursuit of ‘resilient cities and human settlements’ as part of the third transformative commitment, encouraging signatories to seek to ‘increase urban systems’ resilience to physical, economic and social shocks and stresses.” UNEP, for its part, has been exploring sustainable consumption and production and circularity for decades, and is looking to better understand its implications at the neighborhood scale infrastructure (green, blue and grey) and food systems strategies are vital to the first two dimensions as they have significant benefits in terms of circularity and climate, especially since resource efficiency can reduce latent stressors and enhance resilience (as noted in the UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda).
UNEP’s Cities Unit is part of the economy division’s Energy and Climatic Branch. Contributing to the UN’s system-wide strategy on sustainable development and the implementation of the New Urban Agenda.
Urban Shift is a GEF-funded program led by UNEP that supports more than 20 cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to adopt integrated approaches to urban development, helping shape cities that are efficient, resilient, and inclusive. UrbanShift brings together global, national, and local stakeholders, and engages with city-based organizations and the private sector to work towards common sustainability visions.
Founded at COP21 and hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (Global ABC) is an international initiative focuses on raising ambitions to meet the Paris climate goals and mobilizing all actors along the value chain– from design to construction, operations, and demolition in the private and public sectors – need to play their part. The Global ABC encourages policy frameworks that promote uptake of cost-effective solutions and private sector innovation.
The District Energy in Cities Initiative is a multi-stakeholder partnership coordinated by UNEP. The Initiative is supporting market transformation efforts to shift the heating and cooling sector to energy efficient and renewable energy solutions.
District energy systems are networks of underground insulated pipes that pump hot or cold water to multiple buildings in a district, neighbourhood or city. Such systems create synergies between the production and supply of heating, cooling, domestic hot water and electricity, and can be integrated with municipal systems such as power, sanitation, sewage treatment, transport and waste. This enables integrated energy grids that fuel low-carbon, energy efficient heating and cooling, and maximize local renewable resources.
The Initiative supports local and national governments to build know-how and implement enabling policies that will accelerate investment in low-carbon and climate-resilient district energy systems. It currently provides technical support to cities in four pilot countries and ten replication countries.
GEO (Group on Earth Observations) for Cities presents a vision of environmentally sustainable and just cities that recognizes the diversity of cities and will help guide these urban transformations. Making progress towards environmentally sustainable, just, and inclusive urban transformation requires pathways to build urban circularity, achieve deep decarbonization, design for urban resilience and support social inclusion and justice in cities.
The Global Initiative for Resource Efficient Cities (GI-REC) is a cooperation platform offered by UN Environment to connect many different institutions that are using systems approaches (specifically urban metabolism and morphology approaches) towards building low-carbon, resilient, and resource efficient cities
