The project brief includes information about the details of the project, the background, objective, description and key achievements of the project.

This information note describes the conference arrangements and provides essential logistical and practical information for delegates.

This is the translated publication of the State of Food and Agriculture 2015, published originally by HQ.

The Asia-Pacific region, despite impressive economic growth, is home to 490 million people still suffering from chronic hunger and it accounts for 62 percent of undernourished people in the world. Other trends and topics that need to be taken into account include population growth, urbanization and change of dietary patterns, issues of malnutrition and food safety, climate change and disaster risk, and unsustainable production and environmental degradation.

The ICMM has developed 20 tools to support mining and metals companies in promoting sustainable community development. These tools will also be useful to companies involved in other sectors. They offer practical guidance for every stage of the mining process from exploration, construction and operations, to decommissioning, closure and ultimately, the post-closure environment.These tools are accompanied by easy-to-use, step-by-step route maps, to help:

• Foster constructive working relationships between communities, companies and governments

The Policy on Environmental and Social Sustainability describes IFC’s commitments, roles, and responsibilities related to environmental and social sustainability. The Performance Standards are directed towards clients, providing guidance on how to identify risks and impacts, and are designed to help avoid, mitigate, and manage risks and impacts as a way of doing business in a sustainable way, including stakeholder engagement and disclosure obligations of the client in relation to project-level activities.

South African cities are under the national and international spotlight again. Community protests over service delivery, disputes about councillor selection, mismanagement and underspending of municipal budgets, and recurrent billing problems have attracted growing public concern. Yet cities have also been fêted for rekindling a spirit of national unity during 2010, delivering world-class transport schemes and leading the economy out of recession.

The residents of the Ganges and Mekong River deltas face serious challenges from rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, pollution from upstream sources, growing populations, and infrastructure that no longer works as planned. In both deltas, scientists working for nearly two decades with communities, local governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have demonstrated the potential to overcome these challenges and substantially improve people’s livelihoods.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a conceptual framework of 17 goals and 169 targets. An abundance of interlinkages exists between them. Land targets are core to achieving most of the SDGs including poverty eradication, food security, gender equality and empowerment of women, adequate housing and urban development, mitigating and adapting to climate change, reducing and preventing land degradation, and fostering peace and stability for prosperity.

The Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) was tasked by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) in its 50th session to “work jointly with custodian agencies and establish a fruitful dialogue between all parties, to further refine the guidelines by taking into account concerns raised at the forty-ninth session of the commission and to prepare criteria for implementation of the guidelines that are based on best practices and on ways to limit the burden that the

CIFOR Infobrief no. 77