Desai and Associates (D&A), in collaboration with the Asia Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) and KPMG, on behalf of USAID with support from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), has developed a comprehensive report on the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector in India. This report underscores the critical role of private sector investment in bridging the significant funding gap to meet SDG 6 by 2030. It highlights progress and persistent challenges in urban sanitation, solid and liquid waste management, and used water treatment. The report provides detailed assessments of the WASH investment environment, sector-specific evaluations, and policy recommendations to enhance private sector participation and financial solutions, emphasizing the urgent need for innovative and sustainable financing to improve community well-being and environmental sustainability.
The "Catalysing Change: Blended Finance for Climate Action" report presents an in-depth analysis of blended finance as a transformative approach for climate change mitigation and adaptation. It highlights how this innovative financing model combines public and private capital and is crucial in closing the funding gap for environment-focused projects. The report details the mechanisms through which blended finance mobilizes resources, minimizes investment risks, and maximizes the impact of climate financing. It emphasizes the necessity of innovative financial structures, particularly in regions prone to climate change impacts, advocating for investments in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and green infrastructure. The case studies on the Industree Foundation, KOIS's REAL Fund, and the Green Climate Fund's Solar Rooftop Drive in India provide practical examples of the application of blended finance and its potential to drive scalable, sustainable projects.
This address was about how the clash of environment and development concerns played out in the Brundtland Commission and the 1992 Rio Conference.The author was personally involved with this quite intimately as the Senior Economic Adviser to the Brundtland Commission, as the Deputy Secretary General of the Rio Summit of 1992, as the UN Under Secretary General in charge of the Commission on Sustainable Development and as the Secretary General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development of 2002.
This paper explores the geopolitics of climate change by examining the current state of climate diplomacy, the geopolitical;itics of mitigation actions that may be undertaken and the consequences of the climate change that is inevitable.
Ecological interdependence involves uncertainty, long-range cause and effect relationships, thresholds and discontinuities, a scale of impact that is reaching limits in some areas, a close connection with the processes of economic globalisation, a geography of impact that cuts across national jurisdictions and an incidence of impact that reflects power relations. For all of these reasons it requires a qualitatively different form of global response.This paper looks at the challenge of environmental governance from four distinct but related perspectives-the ecological, the economic, the ethical and the decision making challenges that need to be addressed by the governance mechanism
What is the principal challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century? Is it the challenge of lifting billions out of poverty into a life of dignity? Or is it one of ensuring that we do not transgress the boundaries beyond which the risks of cata- strophic environmental change are unacceptably large? In my view the word ‘or’ in the previous question is misleading. The two challenges are now so connected that coping with one requires that we cope also with the other. That is what sustainable development is all about – how poverty eradication and environmental protection can be mutually supportive.