Afghanistan

Snow leopard poaching and trafficking – referred to herein as snow leopard crime – is revisited 13 years after TRAFFIC’s first report on the subject, Fading Footprints: The Killing and Trade of Snow Leopards. This report builds on a preliminary analysis published in May 2016 (Maheshwari and von Meibom, 2016).

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. 

Asia has a rich cultural and natural heritage, but rapid development, population growth and an erosion of traditional practices are resulting in habitat loss and degradation, which is putting protected areas in Asia at risk and leading to serious decline in the biodiversity they harbour.

Through the long efforts of what began as a group of French volunteers, an exemplary Bat Action Plan has been produced by the Society for the Protection of Prespa at the transboundary level, significantly increasing the limited knowledge on bats in the Transboundary Prespa Park.

This report, which inaugurates a new policy series by UNEP on the environmental dimensions of disasters and conflicts, aims to summarize the latest knowledge and field experience on the linkages between environment, conflict and peacebuilding, and to demonstrate the need for those linkages to be addressed in a more coherent and systematic way by the UN, Member States and other stakeholders.

This report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how peacekeeping operations affect and are affected by natural resources and environmental conditions. The report is divided into two main parts. Part 1 reviews the environmental management of peacekeeping operations and showcases good practices, technologies and behaviours that have already been adopted.