3 May 2012: European Commission President José Manuel Durão Barroso and Chinese Vice-Premier Li Keqiang met in Brussels, Belgium, in the First EU-China High Level Meeting on Energy, which saw the signing of a number of agreements and declarations.
3 May 2012: The World Bank published a book titled, “Sustainable Low-Carbon City Development in China,” offering practical lessons to policymakers in China to organize and coordinate sustainable low-carbon urban development.
2 May 2012: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) hosted a seminar titled "Vulnerable cities: Waking up to the need for urban disaster risk management," which outlined ways to build resilient local government units that integrate community participation into decision making, improve construction practices and funding, and better prepare communities for climate change impacts.
April 2012: The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, has launched a Green Buildings Certification System (EDGE) to encourage companies to invest in sustainably-designed buildings.
The Mediterranean City: A Conference on Climate Change Adaptation will initiate an ongoing collaboration of cities working together to share ideas, needs and strategies to adapt to the current and future impacts of climate change as they similarly affect the five Mediterranean-climate regions of the world. The conference will bring together an international network of experts from the academic, policy, business, public health and government worlds. Mediterranean-climate regions largely occur along the western edges of continents between the 30 degree and 40 degree parallels in both northern and southern hemispheres. The Mediterranean climate, moderated by cold ocean currents offshore, is characterized by hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. While these ecosystems cover just under three percent of the earth's land area, they contain about 20 percent of its plant biodiversity, including over 26, 000 endemic species.
17 April 2012: The European Commission Directorate General (DG) Climate Action has launched a project to help European cities adapt to climate change. The project, with is placed with a consortium led by ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability and others, will prepare cities to address the challenges posed by climate change through capacity building, exchange of knowledge and best practices, and the development of tools and guidance.
The Inter-American Development Bank is organizing an event on Climate Change and Sustainability on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20). The event is open to the private and public sectors as well as civil society. Discussions will address, among other topics: mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilient low carbon development, biodiversity, sustainable energy and the challenges of a local level sustainability agenda.
23 April 2012: The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), in its capacity as secretariat of the UN Environment Management Group (EMG) has released the UN's third annual “Moving Towards a Climate Neutral UN” report, which details the UN's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2010, as well as ongoing efforts to reduce them.
20 April 2012: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has released a publication titled "Drying up: What to do about droughts in the People's Republic of China." The study explores the difficulties that China will face in supplying its cities with water and in managing more frequent and longer droughts in the face of climate change.
April 2012: The World Bank has reported on an initiative to develop disaster risk assessment tools and plan for future disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Pacific Island countries titled the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative (PCRAFI).
| Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) |
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| Conference Reporting Services (CRS) |
