The AIPH World Green City Awards are designed to champion ambitious nature-orientated approaches to city design and operation. Specifically, they seek to recognise public initiatives relying on a greater use of plants and nature to create better city environments – helping to fulfil local aspirations for improved economic, social and environmental resilience. The awards celebrate innovation, achievement, and commitment to the globally recognised imperative to embrace nature-orientated solutions that harvest the power of plants and associated ecosystems services to help address the major challenges facing cities today – or tomorrow.

AIPH initiated these awards to bring wide recognition to the value of plants in providing solutions for common city problems and create an enabling environment to shape and nurture a strategic shift in city governance and planning.

Entries are now open to cities for the inaugural 2022 edition of the AIPH World Green City Awards. AIPH and partners invite all cities, large and small, to showcase their ambitious actions for nature and enter today!

An energy transition that fails to engage with fossil fuel-producing countries and their needs could have profound implications for regional and international security and the stability of global energy markets. If oil revenues start to decline before producer countries have successfully diversified their economies, livelihoods will be lost and poverty rates will increase. In a region with one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations in the world, economic hardship and increasing unemployment risk creating broader unrest and instability.

Some interesting thoughts on how to mainstream natural capital accounting from Ina Porras, Senior Economist at the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Inas recently presented at the 6th International Conference on Eco-Compensation and Payments for Ecosystem Services.

Raising awareness among forest dwellers in Bhutan about the extent to which they rely on benefits commonly known as ecosystem services can encourage their participation in the sustainable management of forests, according to the findings of a new study.

How can demand management and nature-based solutions help achieve water security for all, while helping protect and restore the natural environment?

COVID-19 has forced the global economic system to a near-standstill. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reorient our economy towards a greener, fairer future by investing in natural capital. But so far, governments have dedicated less than 3% of COVID recovery spending to natural capital investments.

A new report by WWF reveals that 39 million jobs worldwide could be created if governments reallocated just one year’s worth of subsidies that harm biodiversity to a nature-positive stimulus instead. The biggest opportunity comes from the sustainable agriculture / food sector, accounting for nearly 30% of the total number of jobs created.

Very interesting new development: The Central Bank of Chile will be part of the Natural Capital Committee.

"The Central Bank of Chile, through its Statistics Division, will focus on identifying concrete methodologies and viable plans for implementing the measurement of Natural Capital, building on its expertise in the development of National Economic Accounts and following the recently published UN guidelines (System of Economic-Environmental Accounting, Ecosystem Accounting, 2021)."

Photo by Alex Wolowiecki on Unsplash