Sustainable Cities and Communities

Nowcasting can play a key role in giving policymakers timelier insight to data published with a significant time lag, such as final GDP figures. Currently, there are a plethora of methodologies and approaches for practitioners to choose from. However, there lacks a comprehensive comparison of these disparate approaches in terms of predictive performance and characteristics. This paper addresses that deficiency by examining the performance of 12 different methodologies in nowcasting US quarterly GDP growth, including all the methods most commonly employed in nowcasting, as well as some of the most popular traditional machine learning approaches. Performance was assessed on three different tumultuous periods in US economic history: the early 1980s recession, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID crisis. The two best performing methodologies in the analysis were long short-term memory artificial neural networks (LSTM) and Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR).

Population and housing censuses are not being carried out as they were planned before the pandemic. National authorities to remain fully committed to conduct the censuses depending on national circumstances. Postponing census-taking will have adverse impact on assessing the effects of national development policies due to lack of granular census statistics in the 2020’s

This paper examines how social benefits contributed to reducing the scarring effects of monetary poverty among children in European countries in the years following the Great Recession. Based on the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions database, our findings highlight that social benefit functions differ in their ability to reduce the risk of monetary poverty for children with previous experience in poverty. While family/children’s benefits are crucial in reducing child poverty in general, they are not significant in terms of reducing the scarring effects of child poverty. Old age/ survivors’ benefits meanwhile appear to be a significant support for children with prior experience in poverty. Empirical evidence thus suggests the effectiveness of social transfers to combat occasional child poverty does not always coincide with their effectiveness in preventing children from remaining in poverty year after year.

Achieving sustainable development requires determined actions to revamp production and consumption patterns, creating a resource-efficient and resilient post-pandemic recovery. The notion of the circular economy facilitates greater level of social and environmental sustainability, by emphasizing the vision of an economic system that designs out waste and pollution, keeps products and martials in use and recognizes the residual value in natural resources and post-consumption waste, to regenerate the natural system. Cooperatives and other enterprises of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) are recognized as taking a leading role in incorporating the circular economic model into their businesses and communities. More supportive measures from governments are needed to strength their contribution to accelerated progress towards the goals of the 2030 Agenda. Continued efforts to improve statistical information on the circular economy, cooperatives and the wider SSE will help inform policy-making and facilitate transition to sustainable production and consumption.

On 15 November 2022, the world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion people, having grown by 1 billion since 2010. This is a remarkable milestone given that the human population numbered under 1 billion for millennia until around 1800, and that it took more than 100 years to grow from 1 to 2 billion. By comparison, the increase of the world’s population over the last century has been quite rapid. Despite a gradual slowing in the pace of growth, the global population is projected to surpass 9 billion around 2037 and 10 billion around 2058 (figure 1). This rapid growth of the human population is a testament to achievements in public health and medicine, such as improvements in sanitation and disease control, better access to clean drinking water, and the development of vaccines, antibacterial drugs and other effective medical therapies. Together with improved nutrition and rising standards of living, such achievements lowered the risk of dying, especially among children, and generated an unprecedented growth of populations throughout the world.

The UNECE region is experiencing a steady increase in the number and diversity of retired labour migrants and migrant eldercare workers. The international mobility of older persons is also on the rise. Yet the participation of migrants in the host communities and their access to welfare remains a challenging issue. Compared to native-born peers, older migrants are often more vulnerable to poor socio-economic and health status, social isolation and exclusion. Lower income, poorer working and housing conditions, including their concentration in low-income neighbourhoods, are among the factors affecting the life trajectories of many migrants. Migrant elder carers – independent of their age – often work informally without proper employment contracts and with limited access to health and social protection. There is, however, heterogeneity and variation in older migrants’ vulnerabilities and needs across and within ethnic groups, with consequent important welfare implications, which call for targeted policy responses at local, national, and international levels. A sound evidence base for such policy responses is lacking as older migrants are often overlooked in research, mainly due to a lack of data.

This policy brief explores the auspicious role the private sector can play in addressing fragility, responding to crises and building resilient communities to prevent conflict and sustain peace. To that end, the brief identifies five dimensions through which national and local governments, policymakers and development practitioners can leverage the largely under-tapped experience, expertise and connections of the business community in sustaining peace. Furthermore, by moving beyond typical frameworks on engaging the private sector solely for resource mobilization, this policy brief provides new insights for businesses themselves on how and why they should align their activities with people, planet, profit and . . . peace.

Safe drinking water and sanitation are essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights. They are particularly important for women and girls, who are most often the primary users, providers and managers of water in their households. Where running water is unavailable at home, women and girls are the ones primarily responsible for traveling long distances to collect it. The lack of safe water and adequate sanitation facilities exposes women and girls to illness, violence and hampers their ability to learn and earn an income. With the objective of raising awareness around the gender and water nexus, UN Women has embarked on the production of an SDG Spotlight paper focused on evaluating SDG 6 from a gender perspective. The short paper reviews the state of gender equality as it relates to SDG 6 and showcases how a gender perspective, along with robust data disaggregation by sex, and other relevant characteristics can inform and strengthen the discourse around SDG 6 acceleration. Pressing data gaps and measurement challenges, along with policy recommendations are also captured and discussed in the paper.

This paper discusses how targeted interventions, either at the local or sectoral level, may shape migration and forced displacement dynamics. To assess the channels through which public policies and development initiatives potentially affect human mobility intentions and outcomes, the paper first focuses on the many—and sometimes counterintuitive—reasons why people leave their countries of origin. The drivers of both ‘voluntary’ migration and forced displacement span all dimensions of people’s lives, including economic, social, political and environmental ones. The paper then analyses the empirical evidence on the observed impact of targeted interventions on the propensity to move, either by choice or by force. The literature on the consequences of local and sectoral interventions on the behaviour of individuals in terms of human mobility remains limited, and new approaches are needed to capture more consistently the different channels of transmission. The paper thus offers potential research avenues and methodological options for better understanding of how targeted interventions can contribute to mitigating the adverse drivers of irregular migration and forced displacement.

يستند الموجز إلى التقرير العربي الثاني حول الفقر المتعدد الأبعاد (2023)، ويعطي صورة محدّثة عن حالة عدد من البلدان العربية. ويعتمد في التحليل على بيانات مسوح حديثة من ثلاثة بلدان متوسطة الدخل هي الأردن وتونس ومصر، وثلاثة بلدان من الأقل نمواً هي جزر القمر وموريتانيا واليمن. ويستعرض التحديات الجديدة والمستمرة التي يواجهها كلٌّ من هذه البلدان. ورغم التقدّم الذي يبيّنه الموجز في مجالات معينة، يظهر أنّ الفقر المتعدد الأبعاد لا يزال مستشرياً لا سيما في أقل البلدان نمواً، إذ لم يسجّل سوى تراجع هامشي أو بقي مرتفعًا جداً على مدار العقد الماضي. ويؤكد الحاجة الملحة ليكثّف واضعو السياسات جهودهم في مجالات رئيسية مثل التعليم، والخدمات العامة، وظروف المعيشة الأساسية. ويقدّم الموجز مشورةً مدعومةً بالبيانات تساعد أصحاب المصلحة في التصدّي للتحديات المعقدة والمتغيّرة المرتبطة بالفقر المتعدد الأبعاد، ويدعو إلى إجراءات محدّدة وجهود متواصلة تسهم في تحقيق تنمية عادلة في أنحاء المنطقة العربية.