Publications & Documents

What are the root causes of gender inequality? Building on the fifth edition of the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), the SIGI 2023 Global Report provides a global outlook of discriminatory social institutions, the fundamental causes of gender inequality. It reveals how formal and informal laws, social norms and practices limit women’s and girls’ rights and opportunities in all aspects of their lives. Globally, 40% of them continue to live in countries where gender-based discrimination is assessed as high or very high. The report stresses how discriminatory social institutions curtail women’s and adolescents’ fundamental access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. It also sheds light on the gendered impacts of climate change and underlines how women can play a pivotal role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. To accelerate efforts aimed at achieving SDG 5 and eliminating the underlying and structural factors that hamper women’s empowerment, the report offers concrete policy actions. It calls for a gender-transformative approach to leverage crises and challenges into windows of opportunity to establish women and men as agents of change.

With half of the world’s habitable land being used for agriculture, monitoring the biodiversity on agricultural land is essential for meeting the objectives of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This paper seeks to advance the monitoring of farmland biodiversity in OECD countries by investigating current national initiatives and proposing guidelines for the development of an indicator based on habitat. The proposed approach provides a flexible and pragmatic framework to harmonise reporting from national programmes while accommodating cross-country diversity in contextual factors, including farming systems, climate, biophysical conditions and species pools. To facilitate implementation in the near term, the indicator includes a three-tiered approach to reporting based on data availability, which accommodates countries with limited data resources as well as those that currently have monitoring programmes in place.

National climate change adaptation programmes can strengthen agriculture’s resilience to adverse climatic events by investing in absorptive capacity to mitigate the impact of a shock in the short run, adaptive capacity to effect incremental changes in the medium run, and transformative capacity to create fundamentally new agricultural production systems in the long run. Using UNFCCC reporting documents, this analysis takes stock of agricultural climate change adaptation programmes in OECD countries and evaluates their contribution to developing resilience. Significant investments have been undertaken in the creation of decision support tools, the management of soil and water resources, and cultivar selection and breeding to address key agricultural vulnerabilities, namely drought, flooding and declining crop yields. Adaptation programmes developed to date most heavily emphasise adaptive capacity to address sustained and growing climate risks. Actions that contribute to transformative capacity are beginning to emerge, but lag behind medium-run measures.

Environmental crime is on the rise and is of growing concern to policy makers, to legitimate businesses, and more broadly to the general public. It is growing rapidly worldwide on average at over 8% per year, with an estimated value between USD 110-281 billion in 2018. Emerging issues include wildlife trafficking, illegal timber, illegal mining, illegal chemicals, illegal waste trafficking, and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Environmental crime can have serious implications to human health and the environment, to the global economy, and more broadly to good governance, national security and sustainable development. Addressing these criminal activities affecting the environment is difficult exclusively at the national level as they often extend on a transnational scale. In this context, this report provides a snapshot of cross-border environmental crime and available initiatives to tackle illegal activities at a transnational scale, with a particular focus on multilateral and regional frameworks. The key message from this report is that the increasing prevalence of cross-border environmental crime is due to regulatory failures and the growing involvement of transnational organised crimes, which require an internationally co-ordinated response, both at the multilateral and regional level.