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Focus Areas
Poverty-Environment Action for SDGs
Poverty-environment mainstreaming is an important part of institutional change process to integrate poverty environment linkages into policy and planning, budgeting and implementation processes at all planning levels. It is a multi-year, multi-stakeholder effort that entails working with state actors to enhance environmental and natural resource sustainability as a means to help achieve poverty eradication.
Poverty Environment Action for the Sustainable Development Goals is a joint global project which provides an avenue for the poverty environment mainstreaming process. It emanates from the sustained partnership between UNDP and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as strategic actors within the UN system to advance the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. It is four-year project (2018-2022) jointly implemented by UNDP and UNEP with Global Policy Centre on Resilient Ecosystems and Desertification (GC-RED) as the Managing Agent with a US$ 20 million budget through a pooled fund, financed by the European Union (EU), Austrian Development Agency (ADA), Norway and Sweden through UNEP, as well as core resources from the UN agencies.
Poverty-Environment Action aims at mainstreaming environmental sustainability and climate objectives for poverty eradication into development planning, budgeting and monitoring systems into public and private finance and investment. Eight full-fledged countries are being supported through the initiative with four in Africa (Rwanda, Mauritania, Malawi, Mozambique) and four in Asia (Bangladesh, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Nepal). Additionally, Tanzania and Indonesia are also being supported with technical assistance.
Photo: UNDP
Poverty-Environment Action builds on the success of a similar partnership that leveraged the comparative advantages of the UN Agencies. The Poverty Environment Initiative (PEI) has pioneered integrated approaches to mainstreaming poverty-environment linkages in national development planning and implementation processes—first in support of national efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and now as a model for implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
By building on PEI’s legacy, Poverty-Environment Action is uniquely placed to ensure that the environmental dimension is not left behind when addressing poverty. Poverty-Environment Action also provides opportunities to improve the quality of private sector investments to support poverty-environment objectives. This represents the new focus of Poverty-Environment Action—aligning finance and investment with poverty, environment and climate objectives to accelerate SDG implementation.
