Environment and energy are essential for sustainable development. The poor are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and lack of access to clean, affordable energy services. These issues are also global as climate change, loss of biodiversity and ozone layer depletion cannot be addressed by countries acting alone. UNDP helps countries strengthen their capacity to address these challenges at global, national and community levels, seeking out and sharing best practices, providing innovative policy advice and linking partners through pilot projects that help poor people build sustainable livelihoods

Over the past decades, China has experienced one of the world’s fastest ever reductions of poverty. But future efforts to further improve living standards will face growing barriers from environmental degradation. Environmental degradation will become a serious barrier to sustaining China’s hard won development gains in the future, unless urgent actions are taken. Increasing demand for natural resources such as energy, water and productive land, and decreasing sustainability or availability of such resources has brought issues of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and integrated land-water resource management to the top of policy agenda within China’s 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010).

UNDP focuses on supporting China achieve the goals of the 11th Five-Year Plan while also improving compliance with Multilateral Agreements such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the UN Convention on Protection of the Ozone Layer and its Montreal Protocol. We do this by providing technical assistance for policy and legal reform, technology transfer and capacity building to address these issues. With a lack of global progress towards Millennium Development Goal 7 on Environmental Sustainability, the decade towards 2015 is important for both China and the rest of the world. The world will not achieve MDG 7 unless China makes it.