Publications

Despite the growing global support for capacity building to improve soil management, the estimation and reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals, especially from mineral soils in national GHG inventories, is still very limited. In 2021, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and FAO conducted a global survey to...

A Voluntary Local Review (VLR) is an instrument to review and follow-up progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), thus accelerating their localisation. Since 2018, a growing number of local governments worldwide are turning to the VLR process to articulate their sustainable development policies, highlighting the growing...

The aim of this e-learning course is to learn how the climate projection tool “ ClimoCast” can be used in the NAP process. The tool covers all countries around the world, and allows users to compare different climate scenarios and models, as well as downscale the results to the sub-national level, which is very useful for adaptation planning. The...

With the mounting pressure of urbanization, how innovative blue-green infrastructure (BGI) can restore the ecosystem services of urban rivers is a timely issue for any densely populated city seeking to improve its resilience and sustainability through ecosystem-based solutions. Yet, the implementation of BGI is not hazard-free. Its success usually...

The members of the Circular Economy Solutions Dialogues (CESD) Sounding Board, call for decisive action to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. The Call for Action is supported by Sounding Board members representing low-, middle- and high-income countries as well as international, local, public and private organizations.

In September 2014, Kashmir witnessed a catastrophic flood resulting in a significant loss of lives and property. Such massive losses could have been avoided if any structural support such as dams were constructed in the Jhelum basin, which has a history of devastating floods. The GIS based multicriteria analysis (MCA) model provided three...

A city region is a unit comprising an urban core and surrounding peri-urban and, occasionally, rural areas. The Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere (R-CES) proposed by the Japanese government is a guiding approach for policymaking that prioritises the harmonised flow of resources between urban and rural areas, low-carbon society, circular...

Reversing ecosystem degradation and halting global biodiversity loss due to climate change and other anthropogenic drivers are essential for socio-economic development and human wellbeing, as well as for advancing global sustainability. The latest initiative in this direction is the ‘Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’, which establishes a...

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set to end in 2030, the world has entered a “decisive decade”—a quickly closing window that could determine whether a sustainable future is within reach. The following messages outline steps that IGES, policymakers, businesses, civil society, and other stakeholders can take to implement the five SDGs...

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most creative advances in Deep Learning (DL) in recent years. The Remote Sensing (RS) community has adopted GANs quickly, and reported successful use in a wide variety of applications. Given a sharp increase in research on GANs in the field of RS, there is a need for an in-depth review of the...