Air pollution levels in Georgia are considered unhealthy with annual average of fine particles PM2.5 exceeding the World Health Organization's air quality guideline by at least three times.
To support Georgia in further improving its air quality management system, a new EU-funded project, entitled ‘Air Quality for Better Citizen’s Health’ was launched on 19 April.
Following the decision of Parties to the UNECE Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (Air Convention) to revise the Protocol to Abate Acidification, Eutrophication and Ground-Level Ozone (Gothenburg Protocol), which is expected to further strengthen efforts to reduce air pollution in Europe and North America, technical and scientific work has begun to support the revision process.
In the declaration issued following their latest meeting in Milan, G7 transport ministers have recognized the role of UNECE in advancing sustainable low-carbon mobility. In particular, they welcomed the recently adopted UNECE Strategy on Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Inland Transport, which aims to set a medium- and long-term course towards net-zero GHG emissions from inland transport by 2050.
Mapping air pollutant emission sources of a given country can help experts and decision-makers understand which policies are most viable. Spatial allocations of emissions are also important to understand where emissions are coming from on a regional level.
Spatially allocating – or gridding – emissions is technically complex. It requires applying the gridding matrix to the inventory emissions to transform source-based inventory emissions to gridded emissions.
Much of Chad's water resources are shared, notably the Lake Chad basin and its many tributaries and distributaries (shared with Cameroon, Central African Republic, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and Algeria), the Niger River basin (shared with Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria) and the Nubian Sandstone aquifer system (shared with Libya, Egypt and Sudan).
Guaranteeing safe access to drinking water and sanitation remains a challenge in the pan-European region, with 16 million people still lacking access to basic drinking water services and over 29 million people not having access to basic sanitation, including hundreds of thousands who have to practice open defecation.
“Action for water is action for peace…Achieving it relies on far greater cooperation…We must accelerate efforts to work together across borders, and I urge all countries to join and implement the United Nations Water Convention – which promotes managing shared water resources sustainably.”
In a world grappling with the escalating crisis of global warming – evidenced by the accelerated melting of glaciers worldwide – the imperative for action has never been greater. Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are the foremost contributor to global warming, accounting for a staggering 75% of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This shows we need to minimize our reliance on fossil fuels and confront the widespread consequences of fossil fuel-derived materials, notably plastics.
Today, a new project to be implemented by UNECE with the support of Switzerland was launched in Tashkent, underscoring Uzbekistan's commitment to improving water and health governance and safe management of industrial and tailing facilities.
Around 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change and many of them are in transboundary basins. Droughts do not recognize borders, pose transboundary risks, and require cooperation to address them.