With the global spread of COVID-19, businesses are facing bankruptcy at an unprecedented scale, resulting in job losses for millions. In this context, confidence in the durability of the global economy, and by extension the norms and institutions that support it, are being tested like never before. How businesses respond to the crisis—especially those firms who receive state support to continue operations—will shape public attitudes towards the private sector for years to come. In response to these circumstances, UNDP has designed a simple and accessible tool, the Human Rights Due Diligence and COVID-19: Rapid Self-Assessment for Business (C19 Rapid Self-Assessment), to help businesses consider and manage the human rights impacts of their operations. This non-exhaustive list of potential actions allows for rapid but continuous reflection on the human rights risks and impacts common to many industries. The C19 Rapid Self-Assessment is offered to companies as a partial but informative view of human rights actions in the specific context of COVID-19. The listed actions are based on relevant provisions of UN Human Rights Treaties, the ILO Fundamental Conventions, and the UNGPs. It is organized to present key actions or considerations along three stages of the COVID-19 crisis period: Prepare, Respond and Recover. The C19 Rapid-Self Assessment is also inspired and guided by the global UNDP COVID-19 Integrated Response Offer. The tool has been developed within the framework of the Business and Human Rights in Asia (B+HR Asia) programme as a joint product of the Enabling Sustainable Economic Growth through the Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework project funded by the European Union and the Promoting Responsible Business Practices through Regional Partnerships project funded by the Government of Sweden.   , full_html, This tool is designed to help businesses consider and manage the human rights impacts of their operations in the specific context of COVID-19. It presents key actions or considerations along three stages of the COVID-19 crisis period: Prepare, Respond and Recover.

With 1.2 million respondents, the Peoples' Climate Vote is the largest survey of public opinion on climate change ever conducted. Using a new and unconventional approach to polling, results span 50 countries covering 56% of the world's population. The Peoples' Climate Vote is a pillar of the Mission 1.5 campaign launched in 2020 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and partners, including the University of Oxford, and a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to educate people about climate change solutions and ask them about the actions that they think governments should take. The aim of the Peoples' Climate Vote is to connect the public to policymakers – and to provide the latter with reliable information on whether people considered climate change an emergency, and how they would like their countries to respond.   For some countries, this is the first time they have access to systematically gathered and analysed information on public opinion on climate change and policy solutions. Even for countries that have an understanding of overall public sentiment on climate change, it is often the first time that detailed questions have been asked about policy solutions on this scale. These perspectives are needed now more than ever as countries around the world are in the process of developing new national climate pledges – known as Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs – under the Paris Agreement. As the world's largest provider of support to countries for NDC design, UNDP has found that a key factor for countries raising levels of climate ambition is popular support for policies that address climate change. With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, the Peoples' Climate Vote took on added meaning by providing insight into perceptions about the climate crisis in the context of a global pandemic. Many of the policy choices in the Peoples' Climate Vote – whether relating to jobs, energy, protecting nature or company regulation – speak to issues that countries are facing as they chart their recoveries.  , full_html, With 1.2 million respondents, the Peoples' Climate Vote is the largest survey of public opinion on climate change ever conducted. Using a new and unconventional approach to polling, results span 50 countries covering 56% of the world's population.

The conservation, rehabilitation and climate-informed management of biodiversity and ecosystems increases resilience to climate change and provides low-cost and long-term solutions to protect lives, livelihoods and infrastructure, and advance progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. Human, economic and social development relies on the health of natural systems. Ecosystems can significantly reduce the impact of floods, catastrophic storms and serious droughts, and can offset vast amounts of the world’s CO2 emissions. It powers industries, provides fresh water supply, food, shelter and reliable sources of incomes. The rate at which current development pathways damage and destroy natural capital, biodiversity and ecosystems is putting Earth’s flora and fauna at risk and is exacerbating climate change impacts across the globe affecting those most vulnerable to climate change. We are fast-losing nature’s capacity to regulate an inhabitable climate and systems that support our life on Earth. Case in point: in 2019, over 4.5 million forest fires worldwide larger than one square kilometer, were registered. Over 90 per cent were caused (either intentionally in the name of development and agri-business, or accidentally) by humans. A vicious cycle is created whereby deforestation increases CO2 emissions, fueling climate change and worsening droughts, which in turn increases the risk of fire. Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) provides multiple benefits in terms of poverty alleviation through livelihood opportunities, carbon storage and biodiversity conservation. It is one of the most effective pro-poor approaches to climate change adaptation by way of enhancing the adaptive capacity of the most vulnerable communities – especially women, the elderly and children – as well as the resilience of ecosystems and their services (fresh water, food security, climate regulation, etc.) through restoration of natural capital and biodiversity conservation, restoration and/or regeneration measures. Ecosystem-based approaches, such as support to wetlands and mangrove protection or reef regeneration, often represent low-cost solutions to grey adaptation measures such as sea walls. Failure to act on rehabilitation is costing our global economy as much as US$20 trillion a year in lost ecosystem goods and services. Across coral reef coastlines, coral reefs reduce the annual expected damages from storms by more than US$4 billion. For successful EbA, sound understanding of ecosystems and their role in adaptation to and mitigation of climate change impacts is critical. First, climate observations and projections must be studied to understand their impact on local ecosystems and ecosystem services and then ecosystem-based solutions can be proposed. EbA measures often have CO2 mitigation and sequestration potential, support regenerative agriculture, increased fish stocks, restoration of degraded areas, increase tree coverage, protection of wetlands and mountain ecosystems that prevent floods and increase water absorption, the restoration of coastal ecosystems that serve as a natural buffer against ever-more-powerful storms for disaster risk reduction. , full_html

Through this thematic area, UNDP supports the advancement of climate resilient livelihoods for vulnerable communities, including resilient agricultural value chain development. Climate change has a large negative impact on a wide range of livelihoods, particularly rural livelihoods that are heavily reliant on agricultural activities and more vulnerable to climate-induced risks and shocks. Investing in adaptation interventions to widen livelihood options and develop more resilient livelihoods is crucial to ensure vulnerable communities are able to cope with the impacts of climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. A failure to adopt climate resilient measures to support sustainable livelihoods is likely to jeopardize food and income security, and lead to the loss of assets and increasing impoverishment. Given the centrality of agricultural value chains to most rural livelihoods, interventions to facilitate the development of climate resilient value chains are vital in securing resilient rural livelihoods. This work supports global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially goals for ending hunger and poverty, promoting decent work and economic growth, and supporting responsible consumption and production practices.  For climate resilient value-chain development to be effective it must embrace holistic and integrated approaches encompassing various interventions are more successful as they tend to reinforce one another. Multi-stakeholder platforms that foster commercial, technical, and institutional innovation have more significant and lasting impacts than those focused on governance and coordination issues, while improvements in transportation infrastructure help reduce costs and increase market linkages, and applying information technology reduces asymmetries in market information that have traditionally put rural farmers at a disadvantage compared to downstream market actors.  Gender issues need to be considered specifically in the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions as women are especially disadvantaged in terms of access to land, labor, credit and infrastructure. Effective participation in developing value chains requires a minimum set of assets (not only land and financial capital, but also knowledge, skills, social capital, and access to sources of technical support), which the poorest of the poor lack. Project-based interventions are not enough –the most successful interventions have come where economic and policy environments have supported rural enterprise development and where appropriate policy changes accompanied the interventions.  , full_html

This report shares the results of a study of the first round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with contributions from the UNFCCC secretariat. The analysis shows that climate change is recognized by many countries as a matter of national security, but also as a factor that exacerbates the drivers of different types of conflict and security risks. Conflict and insecurity are also described in the NDCs as increasing vulnerability to climate change and/or as being potentially disruptive to climate action and to the achievement of NDC targets, including in post-conflict situations. While the challenge of achieving peace in contexts affected by climate change is stressed in some NDCs, progress to peace is also recognized as not being necessarily conducive to climate action alone. This highlights the importance of climate-proofing peacebuilding efforts. In this regard, several countries outline concrete measures to integrate climate and security considerations. This includes considering climate change impacts in peacebuilding and security strategies and also ensuring conflict sensitivity in adaptation planning. The dual burden of addressing climate change and conflict or other security risks, including delivering on climate action in conflict-affected settings, is an emergent theme. Adaptation and mitigation (including through carbon sequestration) are recognized in NDCs as having co-benefits for peacebuilding and regarded as an important part of strategies for preventing conflict or sustaining peace in conflict-affected areas. Further examination or a comparative study of second round NDCs could afford other insights or new perspectives.  , full_html

This policy brief explores initial lessons learnt from a climate security perspective of efforts to prevent violent extremism in politically and environmentally fragile contexts affected by climate change. It draws on recent country level examples, preliminary insights from UNDP’s work streams on climate security and the prevention of violent extremism (PVE), as well as an online experts’ consultation held on 2 June 2020. It identifies the need for policy and programming to be informed by cross-cutting climate-related security risks and stresses the importance of further research and examination of good practices to address such risks., full_html, This policy brief explores initial lessons learnt from a climate security perspective of efforts to prevent violent extremism in politically and environmentally fragile contexts affected by climate change. It draws on recent country level examples, preliminary insights from UNDP’s work streams on climate security and the prevention of violent extremism (PVE), as well as an online experts’ consultation held on 2 June 2020. It identifies the need for policy and programming to be informed by cross-cutting climate-related security risks and stresses the importance of further research and examination of good practices to address such risks.