Background

Everybody everywhere depends heavily on their environment, but people living in poverty more so: forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, coral reefs and other ecosystems provide essential resources that provide food, water, shelter and energy. But those ecosystems and those resources are under incredible pressure.
 
In just 60 years, the world's population has accelerated from 2.5 billion people to 7 billion people today. By 2050, another 2 billion will join our planet-mostly in developing countries-increasing the rapidly growing demand for our planet's resources. However, in the last 40 years we have lost more than half of our global biodiversity and we are currently using already more than 1.5 times the resources that our planet can replenish.
 
Threatening to make these problems worse is global climate change, driven, for example, by fossil fuel use and deforestation. We know a changing climate will hurt the poor most, further undermining the livelihoods of millions of people struggling to break free from poverty.
 
The SDGs can help to better manage our natural resources and to deliver climate change mitigation and adaption action- if we get it right. In this webinar, we will explore what is needed to help deliver a new set of goals which are truly sustainable, leading to a life of dignity without destroying the planet's potential to provide for future generations and we will explain the link to other UN processes especially the UNFCCC process to understand the need of including climate change into the SDGs too.


Draft Agenda:

3pm – 3:20pm CET: Lima Conference outcomes and linkages with the post-2015 process - Siddharth Pathak, Policy Coordinator, Climate Action Network

3:20pm – 3:40pm CET: Securing the inclusion of climate change and environmental sustainability in the SDGs - Bernadette Fischler, Beyond 2015 UK co-chair

3:40pm – 4pm CET: Achieving effective targets on climate change and environmental sustainability  - Jorge Laguna, UNEP (TBC)

4pm -4:30pm CET: Discussion