Sustainable Urbanization

Regional Conversation on Air Pollution in Asia-Pacific: On the commemoration of the 1st International Day of Clean Air for blue skies

Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to the right to health today, being responsible for 7 million premature deaths each year. Air pollutants also contribute directly to the climate crisis, endangering health and livelihoods of generations current and future.

COVID-19 Rapid Response Solutions for Cities

By 2050, cities will be home to almost 70% of the world population, leaving no doubt that the achievement or failure of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be determined in cities.

In this rapidly urbanizing world, cities are forced to ask tough questions about how they can solve the unprecedented challenges ahead of them and COVID-19 has come to stress these and the urge for a change.

Pacific Urban Update 2020

All 14 Pacific Developing Member Countries (DMCs) are considered small island developing states (SIDS), of which seven demonstrate the effects of fragility (Table 1). Of the 14 Pacific DMCs, seven (the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, and Tuvalu) have over half of their population living in urban areas. Except for the Cook Islands and Samoa, urbanization rates are increasing in all Pacific DMCs.

Advanced Webinar: Remote Sensing for Monitoring Land Degradation and Sustainable Cities SDGs

In this training, attendees will learn to use a freely-available QGIS plugin,Trends.Earth, created by Conservation International (CI) and have special guest speakers from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and UN Habitat. Trends.Earth allows users to plot time series of key land change indicators. Attendees will learn to produce maps and figures to support monitoring and reporting on land degradation, improvement, and urbanization for SDG indicators 15.3.1 and 11.3.1.

Satellite Derived Annual PM2.5 Data Sets in Support of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Air pollution caused by particles with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5) can reduce visibility and adversely affect human health. As a result, the UN has addressed this type of pollution in the 2030 Agenda. Recently, annual mean PM2.5 maps have been developed using MODIS, MISR, and SeaWiFS observations from 1998-2015 and have been used by organizations, such as the World Health Organization and Greenpeace, to assess global air quality and health impacts.