Events

Theme: Investing in Natural Capital is Investing in Youth

Overview

As emphasized in the Future We Want outcome document from Rio+20, youth are “custodians of the future” and have an essential role in helping achieve sustainable development. If engaged and empowered, GMS youth have the potential to drive the changes needed to ensure a sustainable future for their own and future generations. 

Every three years, environment ministers from the six Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) countries gather to take stock of environment challenges and opportunities, and set the direction for regional responses under the GMS Economic Cooperation Program.

Theme: Designing mechanisms and building partnerships for the strategic planning and management of transboundary and other biodiversity landscapes

Overview

Biodiversity landscapes constitute a large proportion of the natural capital remaining in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). They are a rich repository of globally important biodiversity, including many endemic and endangered species, and provide vital ecosystem services. This wealth of natural capital underpins the subregion’s security in terms of energy, food, and water. Seven of these landscapes cut across international borders. These transboundary biodiversity landscapes (TBLs), which are the focus of the GMS Core Environment Program, lie in juxtaposition to the GMS economic corridors, providing both challenges and opportunities for their effective management and conservation.

Theme: Investing in Natural Capital: Public Private Cooperation for Future Prosperity in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Overview

The Fourth GMS Environment Ministers’ Meeting emphasized the need to strengthen collaboration between governments, development partners, business sector, and civil society in order to find ways to maintain and enhance the region’s natural capital stocks. A key step was the need to strengthen collaboration and coordination between businesses, government, and/or civil society in ways that are demonstrably good for business, local livelihoods and for the protection and enhancement of the subregion’s natural capital. In this context the Natural Capital Business Forum engaged the businesses in their capacity as a beneficiary of public sector investments as well as the investors in economic activities associated with natural capital.

In continuation of CEP support to strengthen Myanmar’s environmental safeguards system, a stakeholder consultation workshop was held in Yangon to seek feedback on the country's Draft Environmental Quality (Emission) Guidelines. The guidelines will support the country's emerging environmental impact assessment (EIA) system by specifying the environmental thresholds that must projects should not exceed.The guidelines will be finalized based on feedback from the workshop and are expected to come into effect during the next few months. The guidelines will be used as interim measure while the country develops National Environmental Quality Standards during the next few years.

Looking forward to the Fourth GMS Environment Ministers Meeting (EMM4) and identifying roundtable collaboration priorities in 2015

At the fourth roundtable , partners identified the natural capital themed EMM4, scheduled for January 2015, as a key opportunity to influence environment leaders and policy makers. 

The Core Environment Program (CEP) ensured green freight issues were high on the agenda at the BAQ-EST conference, which brought together more than 1000 participants under the theme ‘Next Generation Solutions for Clean Air and Sustainable Transport.

Hosted by Myanmar’s Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry, the 9th Semi-Annual Meeting of the Working Group on Environment (WGE SAM-9) brought together WGE members, ADB representatives and development partners to review the Core Environment Program’s 2014 progress and discuss upcoming priorities.

This CEP technical workshop on strengthening partnerships to increase natural capital investments in the GMS brought together government and development partners to jointly discuss the merits and potential shape of a GMS Natural Capital Partnership.