The ‘Municipal Empowerment and Resilience Project’ (MERP) is a joint project by UN-Habitat and UNDP funded by the European Union. The project aims to strengthen the long-term resilience of subnational authorities in Lebanon as well as host communities, refugees and displaced persons affected by the Syrian Crisis.

In preparation for the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to adopt the Global Biodiversity Framework, UN-Habitat has prepared a white paper Cities and Nature: Planning for the Future, which highlights new principles and actions to improve the quality of urbanization, recognizing the importance of nature in cities and the preventative role of spatial planning. It also offers a novel methodology to prioritize interventions along a preserve-conserve-…

Launch of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework requires an integrated territorial (both urban and rural) approach for the sustainable management of biodiversity. Linkages between urban processes and rural transformation across municipalities, countries, and world regions are essential for biodiversity conservation. Urban-rural linkages are constituted by reciprocal and repetitive flows of people, goods, and financial and environmental services between specific rural, peri-urban, and…

This report explores some of the critical challenges that converge at the intersection of climate change and land governance. Some of these challenges are droughts, desertification, disaster risk, land and water management, land degradation and restoration, soil erosion and conservation, biodiversity, and food security.