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Representatives from the Government of Georgia and the United Nations gathered with a variety of public and private road safety stakeholders to review the current state of Georgia’s national road safety and discuss further ways of protecting the citizens on the roads.The Georgia Road Safety…
Forests are increasingly attractive to people as a place of leisure and recreation, but less and less as a workplace. High levels of occupational injury and fatal accidents, low wages and low social status in some areas and sectors, and an ageing and largely male workforce make the sector…
Unemployment rates fell in the overwhelming majority of UNECE member states that reported data in 2016. Compared with 2015, unemployment decreased in 27 out of 32 reporting countries, with 13 countries publishing rates that were over one percentage point lower in 2016. The largest decreases were…
From 25 to 27 April 2017, representatives from key authorities and stakeholders from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan along with experts from the Russian Federation met to discuss issues related to dam safety in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, as part of…
Growing E-Commerce is a driver of innovation and competitiveness. Increasingly, business enterprises, and SMEs in particular, are connected through e-trade with consumers and businesses. Between 2013 and 2015, the value of global online trade jumped from 16 trillion to 22 trillion dollars.…
Over the past years, UNECE’s work in agriculture has expanded from the development of quality/marketing standards to helping governments adopt and implement them and reaching out to traders, producers and farmers. Indeed, “It starts with a standard but it cannot end there” has become one of the…
The UNECE region has taken promising first steps to implement the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Coming together at the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development for the UNECE Region in Geneva on 25 April, about 45 governments and numerous other actors exchanged…
Our health and well-being is contingent on the quality of air we breathe, the water we drink and the ground we live on. Environmental causes are responsible for 22% of all deaths worldwide each year: for 17% of all cancers, 25% of strokes and 44% of asthma cases. According to a report published…
The Eighth Environment for Europe Ministerial Conference (Batumi, Georgia, 8–10 June 2016) addressed education for sustainable development (ESD) issues at the highest regional level, with UNECE ministers in Batumi recognizing education for sustainable development as a cross-cutting theme that…
Azerbaijan is still in the process of negotiating its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Implementation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which entered into force on 22 February 2017, would thus be included in the package of obligations for the country upon accession…
The world is witnessing a new revolution driven by various trends and technologies, and the race is on for new transformative models in energy and material flows. These transformations are shaped by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate action. As new…
The World Bank and the International Energy Agency launched the 2017 Global Tracking Framework (GTF) report in New York on 3 April during the SE4All Forum. The GTF report is intended to measure success in achieving the objectives of the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative. The…
While agriculture is at heart of the Balkans’ economic activities, only a few countries have so far managed to exploit their production and trade potential to the fullest. Ties and trade volumes within the region are stagnating and ties outside the region are limited to a few countries. Has the…
Chad expressed its intention to accede as soon as possible to the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (Water Convention), serviced by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). This is the main outcome of the national…
Effective transboundary cooperation is crucial to address the frequent floods and droughts in the Dniester River basin, shared by the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Such cooperation will become even more important in the future, as climate change is expected to affect the volume and seasonal…
Single Windows ease trade by allowing international traders to submit trade documents to a single centralized location, thus saving time and costs. In 2005, UNECE published Recommendation 33, which lays the foundation for establishing a Single Window environment. Since then, a number of…
UNECE was established in 1947 to promote pan-European economic integration, because, after the horrors of the Second World War, this was deemed “essential to the maintenance of peace”. Over seven decades, the work of UNECE has yielded significant results for the region and has established…
Experts from UNECE member States and the secretariat will be visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina from 27 March to 6 April 2017 for a field mission in the framework of the third environmental performance review (EPR) of the country. The team will meet governmental officials and representatives of…
In Kyiv, a high-level multi-stakeholder meeting on 28 March 2017 marked the restart of the UNECE-assisted water policy process after a six-year pause. Some 50 participants from key stakeholder organizations attended the meeting of the newly formed National Policy Dialogue (NPD) Steering…
With almost a billion people going hungry (795 million people are undernourished according to FAO), hunger is one of the persistent scourges of the world. At the same time, there is more than enough food on the planet to feed the entire world population. FAO estimates that one-third of the food…
Did you know that one in four people in the UNECE region live in rural areas? This is true for almost one in three people over 65 as rural areas experience faster population ageing.Rural areas are more thinly populated and people are more geographically dispersed than in urban areas. For this…
Almost two years have passed since the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by UN Member States. It was a landmark achievement in international cooperation, a plan of action to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle…
Sustainable forest management indicators developed through a participatory process can provide important information on forest resources and support evidence-based forest policies. The concept of criteria and indicators, integrating social, economic and ecological aspects, was developed…
Natural gas is often considered the cleanest fossil fuel. However, its principal component, methane, is a potent greenhouse gas. Although short-lived in the atmosphere, methane contributes more than ten per cent to the overall anthropogenic emissions. Reducing methane emissions is one of the low…
Wood energy is an important renewable energy source. The CO2 absorbed by growing trees is equivalent to the CO2 that is released by burning wood. In 2013, wood energy accounted for 3.5 percent of the total primary energy supply and 37.5% of the renewable energy supply among UNECE member States,…