Water is an essential resource for virtually all aspects of human enterprise, from agriculture via urbanization to energy and industrial production. Equally, the many uses for water create pressures on the natural systems. This report analyses the different ways for quantifying and accounting for water flows and productivity within the economy (including environmental needs).

This report is the third report of its kind since 2009 when the UN first published details of its annual carbon footprint. With a foreword from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and a preface from UNEP’s Executive Director Achim Steiner, this report explains the UN’s ambition towards climate neutrality. It details the greenhouse gas emissions from UN agencies in 2010 and looks back over 2011, explaining and illustrating efforts which are happening across the world, with the UN system to reduce carbon emissions.

This new report by UNEP provides a review of policies and initiatives promoting Sustainable Consumption and Production. It reviews 56 case studies, highlights the best practices and offers recommendations to scale up and replicate them worldwide.

This report discusses the need to balance short-term water productivity gains, particularly in agriculture, with water flows’ long-term role in maintaining sustainable landscape ecosystem services and supporting human well-being.

The UNEP Foresight Report contains a description of the 21 emerging environmental issues identified through the UNEP Foresight Process. The process resulted in a list of 21 emerging environmental issues tagged “21 Issues for the 21st Century” covering the major themes of the global environment including food, land, freshwater, marine, biodiversity, climate change, energy, waste, and technology; as well important cross-cutting issues ranging from the need for better environmental governance, to the need for human behavioral change towards the environment.

This summary of the fifth Global Environment Outlook report released by UNEP focuses on deteriorating state of the global environment and lists priority areas for action and policy recommendations.

The UNEP Year Book 2012 depicts the status of key environmental indicators, shows that we have been experiencing an exceptional level of ecological extremes and highlights the benefits of soil carbon and decommissioning nuclear power plants.

This Guidebook, which is based on the outcome of a UNEP pilot project that was carried out in three South East Asian countries in 2009-2010 - Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam - is intended to serve as a tool to help decision-makers and legal drafters to incorporate measures for adapting to the adverse impacts of climate change into their national sustainable development policies, plans and programmes by creating the necessary legal, regulatory and institutional framework for such action.

This report outlines the outcomes of a one day stakeholders workshop organised by CEPT University’s Centre for Urban Equity (CUE), that took place on 29 August 2011. The objective of the workshop was to discuss indicators for sustainable transport that cover environmental, economic and social concerns.

The tiny fraction of freshwater not bound up in ice sheets and glaciers comprises only a very small fraction of total global water volume (about 0.79 %). Global use of that freshwater, however, has been growing at roughly twice the rate of global population for the past century. Even so, this volume of unfrozen freshwater is still more than adequate to meet all human needs. However, this essential resource, which is mostly stored as groundwater, is distributed quite unevenly around the globe.