Month: January 2018

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum, to be held on 30-31 January 2018, will provide a platform for youth to engage in a dialogue with Member States and to discuss the policy frameworks and promote innovative, institutionalised approaches and initiatives for advancing the youth development agenda at national, regional and global levels with a view to promoting solutions to the global challenge of strengthening resilience and sustainable development.

In 2015, countries made a bold and ambitious commitment when adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Target 15.2 of SDG 15 on Life on Land calls for halting deforestation by 2020, among others. In addition, the UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2017-2030 (UNSPF) adopted in 2017 by the UN General Assembly calls for reversing the loss of forest cover and increasing forest area by 3 percent worldwide by 2030 (Global Forest Goal 1, Target 1.1).

This international conference, organized by the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, will bring together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the challenges of halting and reversing deforestation and to jointly explore ways to accelerate progress towards achieving in particular the SDG Target 15.2 and Target 1.1 of the UNSPF.

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The conference aims to inspire the next frontier of research focused on the science of cities and climate change. The primary goal of the conference is to assess the state of academic and practice-based knowledge related to cities and climate change, and to establish a global research agenda based on the joint identification of key gaps by the academic, practitioner and urban policy-making communities.

The conference seeks to forge stronger partnerships among these communities and catalyze new processes for joint knowledge production; connect existing data platforms and potentially initiate new ones; as well as catalyze funding to meet these goals. It will bring together representatives from academia, scientific bodies, other research organizations and agencies; member states of the United Nations; city and regional governments; and urban and climate change practitioners and policy-makers. The main aims are to improve scientific knowledge and to stimulate research underpinning effective and efficient urban responses to climate change, as well as to provide inputs to the products of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Climate Change and a whole and global warming in particular,  are known to have a negative impact on biodiversity in  three main ways. Firstly, increases in temperatures are known to be detrimental to a number of organisms, especially those in sensitive habitats such as coral reefs and rainforests. Secondly, the pressures posed by a changing climate  may lead to sets of responses in areas as varied as phenology, range and physiology of living organismss, often leading to changes in life cycles (especially but not only in reproduction), losses in productivity or even death. On occasions, the very survival of some very sensitive species may be  endangered. Thirdly, the impacts of climate change to biodiversity are estimated to be felt in the short term in respect of some species and ecosystems, but also in the medium and long term in many biomes. Indeed, if left unattended, some of these impacts may be irreversible.

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