Over the past two years, the FAO and RECOFTC – The Center for People and Forests have brought together regional experts to reflect on the outcomes of the 15th and 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The resulting booklets Forests and Climate Change After Copenhagen: An Asia-Pacific Perspective and Forests and Climate Change After Cancun: An Asia-Pacific Perspective were distributed widely and very well received.

The Asia-Pacific region continues to face a deeply challenging external environment. The V-shaped recovery from the depths of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis in 2010 proved to be short-lived, as the world economy entered the second stage of the crisis in 2011, due to euro zone debt concerns and the continued uncertain outlook for the United States economy. The region will be affected by slackening demand for its exports and higher costs of capital, as well as by loose monetary policies and trade protection measures of some advanced economies.

This latest regional human development report for the Asia Pacific focuses on the need for the region to find ways to continue to grow economically while reducing poverty and tackling climate change and environmental concerns.

The Low Carbon Green Growth Roadmap for Asia and the Pacific explores the opportunities that a low carbon green growth path offers to the region. It articulates five tracks on which to drive the economic system change necessary to pursue low carbon green growth as a new economic development path.

This Bangladesh outlook report reflects on problems faced by the country’s forestry sector. By 2020 there will be a big gap between supply and demand for wood while people’s expectations of forestry will have increased in many new directions. To create a brighter future for forestry there are needs to establish a national-level forestry forum, initiate mass awareness-raising programmes, bring unclassified state forests under proper management and strengthen the Forest Department.

This publication serves as a resource for community level facilitators to provide explanations about the basics of climate change and the role of forests. It aims to raise the awareness of grassroots stakeholders for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) through answering nine frequently asked questions. The questions because they are frequently asked by grassroots communities, and local level facilitators should be able to answer them in the simplest way in order to deliver a consistent message throughout the project areas and countries.

The effective use and application of ICT/ICM for AR4D and its transformation require strong support by policy makers, ICT experts, scientists and other stakeholder groups to implement proper ICM strategies in their respective institutions for better results for the investments. This report assesses the status of ICT/ICM in AR4D in the Asia-Pacific region based on the data elicited from ICM Managers, representing the National Information Nodal Points (NINPs) in NARS of 19 countries in the region, through a questionnaire survey, country status reports and inputs from the experts.

This new report by UNESCAP, ADB & UNDP focuses on disparities in MDG achievement within and between countries, to address major bottlenecks holding back MDG progress in Asia-Pacific region.

This new ADB report provides insights into Asian and Pacific resource use trends and outlines key actions that governments can pursue to help bring economic growth strategies in closer alignment with the objective of sustainable development.

The guidelines provide the basic knowledge on how to initiate, plan, implement and maintain decentralized wastewater management for sustainable infrastructure development in small urban areas. Special emphasis is given to the improvement of urban water courses; most of them are currently terribly polluted. The main concerns related to deteriorating water quality and declining human health, the advantages of compact and efficient decentralized wastewater treatment and the restoration of small urban water bodies are addressed