Publications

Water scarcity, together with the projected impacts of water stress worldwide, has led to a rapid increase in research on measuring water security. However, water security has been conceptualized under different perspectives, including various aspects and dimensions. Since public health is also an integral part of water security, it is necessary to...

IGES co-organises the 4th webisode of the 15th conference of the Asia Pacific Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (APRSCP), which began on 20 April 2021 and releases new episodes on Tuesdays until 11 May 2021. Co-organised with the S-16 Project of Environment Research and Technology Fund of Japan (project co-led by University of...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as one of the severe and important health disasters during recent times. The impacts of the COVID-19 have spanned across the globe and rightly qualify to be a transboundary disaster. When looked through the lens of transboundary risks, COVID-19 is not the first of its kind. Health and non-health...

Decoupling well-being from resource use and its associated environmental impacts through resource efficiency and circular economy has become the mainstream agenda for sustainable development. Resource productivity and material flow indicators have been widely used to evaluate resource decoupling. Several approaches have been introduced in Europe to...

Urban shrinkage contradicts the normative assumption of cities as growth machines. Shrinking cities are stigmatised as outcasts of urban systems, prone to high unemployment rates, low quality of life standards, and urban blight. Compelled by this dominant narrative of loss, planning responses have focused on reversing declining trajectories and...

Five years after the SDGs were adopted and just when the United Nations called for realising the Decade of Action, the COVID-19 pandemic halted the progress of the SDGs and even reversed some of the achievements that the world made over years. With most countries struggling to overcome the pandemic and revive the economy, losing the focus on the...

Safely managed water supply and wastewater services have been playing key roles in maintaining good water environmental quality, stopping the spread of disease and protecting public health during infectious outbreaks, including of ongoing coronavirus outbreak 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. Recently, there are a growing number of scientific...

Biodiversity knowledge is communicated by scientists to policymakers at the biodiversity “science-policy interface” (SPI). Although the biodiversity SPI is the subject of a growing body of literature, gaps in our understanding include the efficacy of mechanisms to bridge the interface, the quality of information exchanged between science and policy...

This IGES Issue Brief is an update of policy developments related to sustainable finance in Japan between December 2020 and February 2021. Section 1 provides highlights of sustainable finance policy developments in Japan. Section 2 provides policy developments and relevant sources at a glance and in chronological order. Section 3 provides a...

This presentation talks about the rapid regional integration that is happening in Asia and beyond, its positive and negative impacts especially inters of how local risks tend to spill over beyond borders. It presents the cases of the Bangkok floods of 2011, the global food price crisis of 2008, and how financial markets tend to magnify the risks...