Urbanization

Investing in nature and Nature-based Solutions is an important pathway to address the current ecological crisis. The loss of biodiversity, with around one million animal and plant species threatened with extinction, is putting at risk our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide. Diverse and innovative measures are needed to reverse this decline and to restore healthy ecosystems.

The Weight of Cities calls for a new strategy for 21st century urbanization: resource efficiency and social inclusion must become the focus of urban development strategies if we want to stand a chance of achieving the 2030 Development Agenda as well as the New Urban Agenda.

Everyone has a relationship to land, but not everyone's right to land is secure. The Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) recognizes that conventional ways of managing land are not realistically going to meet the needs of millions of people. This book features the “land tools” that GLTN  has developed – practical ways to solve problems in land administration and management.

Housing may be the Third World's most intractable problem, but mud, adobe, earth-bricks, soil-cement and other traditional building materials are cheap, readily available and can be made and used by the poor people themselves to build their own homes. Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for building the millions of houses which will be needed over the next twenty years. 

This classic bestseller is a comprehensive guide to the roots of mass poverty, the social strains and political instability that turn one developing country after another into disaster areas or dangerous flashpoints. Harrison examines climate and colonialism, land hunger, population growth, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy, and these realities are brought home through dramatic first-hand accounts. 

Films included in this compilation are "Mekong: Watch That River!" (2009); "Small Islands, Big Impact" (2009); "South Asia: Crowded Land, Drying Rivers" (2009); and "Yellow River Blues" (2009). Additional information and synopses of the individual films is available from the TVEAP website (www.tveap.org).