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UN DESA Policy Brief No. 170 (Special Issue): Reimagining financing for the SDGs - from filling gaps to shaping finance
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are dangerously off track. The prevailing “gap-filling” approach to SDG financing has proven inadequate, failing to deliver the scale, impact or equity required. Global efforts remain fixated on mobilizing additional financing rather than embedding the SDGs at the core of economic and financial systems. Blended finance, often heralded as a silver bullet, has fallen short: public resources dominate blended deals, often de-risking private initiative in lower-risk, lower-impact projects. To redirect this trajectory, the international financing architecture must be reshaped around the SDGs.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 162: Multilevel Governance for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Effective climate action requires multilevel governance and coordination across national, regional, and local levels of government, as well as with non-state actors, to maximize synergies and ensure inclusive, coherent approaches. By integrating equity into governance arrangements at all levels, global, national and local stakeholders can foster a more effective and sustainable response to climate change.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 156: Enhancing Public Institutions’ Risk-informed Communication to address Multifaceted Crises for Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Climate Action
The ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable information to the public and responders in crises situations is central to risk-informed communication. This brief seeks to examine how to strengthen risk-informed communication for addressing multifaceted crises management, disaster risk reduction, and climate action. It identifies key challenges for strengthening government institutions that are responsible for effective communication, provides guidance on how to integrate risk-informed communication strategies into disaster management and proposes policy recommendations.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 139: Strengthening Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Climate Action through Risk-informed Governance
Ensuring risk-informed governance for climate action requires citizen-centric approach through the whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches including the leverage of government innovation and frontier technologies for DRR and resilience.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 122: Adapting international development cooperation to reduce risk, enable recovery and build resilience
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed new demands on development cooperation in its various forms: finance, capacity support, policy change and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The ongoing challenge of the pandemic and its consequences has also shown the durability and adaptability of development cooperation.
UN/DESA Policy Brief #50: International finance to support climate change resilience
In the past 20 years, weather-related disasters affected 4.2 billion people worldwide, with a large loss of life and livelihoods. The global annual average cost of climatic disasters, including floods, storms, droughts and heat waves, is estimated to have risen from $64 billion during the period 1985-1994 to $154 billion in the period 2005-2014. A more complete estimate of global costs, taking into account the loss associated with slow-onset climate events (e.g., sea-level rise and desertification), is likely to yield a larger figure.