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Nationwide ageing and dramatic depopulation threaten the survival of many Japanese small-sized towns and villages. To address this challenge—which is not unique but that in Japan is compounded by uneven urbanization patterns and increasing ruptures within the socioeconomic order—the Government of Japan is encouraging municipalities to adopt a pro...

A waste bank is a unique community-based waste management system that promotes source separation of waste and recycling. This study conducted a total population sampling targeting all identified waste bank units in Medan City (N = 100) between September 2017 and February 2018. Descriptive statistics were applied to address 16 research questions and...

Regions and places face unprecedented challenges that need ambitious policies to drive sustainable transitions. While the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been shaping the policies (or at least the discourse) of national governments and supranational organisations, there is...

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report highlighted the critical connections between climate actions and sustainable development, including both synergies and trade-offs. Managing the trade-offs through policy design is strongly recommended and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are proposed as a basis for evaluating climate actions in the context...

In 2022, UNEP conducted a regional review of the Voluntary National Reviews (VNR) in Asia-Pacific covering 36 countries and 50 VNRs from an environmental perspective. For indicators, we developed a framework to review the environment-related indicators and data that were used in the VNRs. We found that t he overall coverage of the environment...

The UN 2030 Agenda charts out 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals that require a systems approach to their implementation. However, such a systems approach is new and challenging due to the broad coverage of social, economic and environmental dimensions and complex relations among 169 targets. There is a big knowledge gap about how the...

A Voluntary Local Review (VLR) is an instrument to review and follow-up progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), thus accelerating their localisation. Since 2018, a growing number of local governments worldwide are turning to the VLR process to articulate their sustainable development policies, highlighting the growing...

This study is based on the author’s previous research carried out in Bangkok before the COVID outbreak and after the COVID outbreak, and in Hanoi for both the FW issue and single-use plastic issue to provide a comparative analysis of challenges and opportunities for household food and plastic waste reduction.

This is a scoping paper to frame the study to assess current state and changing patterns of usages, consumption as well as regulation on single use plastics which is triggered or accelerated by COVID-19 pandemic. The study aims to reveal changing consumption patterns of single use plastics through case-studies in selected cities. The study tries to...

This paper explores synergies between climate action and Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs)—an instrument to localise the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development used by regional and local governments to report and monitor their progress towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper argues that fighting climate change and...