Today acclaimed Chinese actress and film director Zhao Wei was appointed the National Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China. In her new role, the actress will focus on raising awareness for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular highlighting poverty reduction and gender equality.

An assessment tool for Chinese cities has been developed to measure Chinese cities’ performance on sustainable development, based on a set of measurable indicators ranging from income, education, health to pollution, and resource consumption, with an aim to help drive urban development towards a more inclusive and resilient future, says a new urbanization report by The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China.

25 Nov 2016 –The report "The Living Standards Dimension for the Human Development Index: Measuring poverty with Big Data' brings a measure called the Living Standards Index that addresses the multi-faceted and complex nature of poverty by combining eight indicators to evaluate the provision of services of the 2,284 counties across the country. The data collected from this report is now available in an interactive visualization map.

Shanghai, 23 November - ‘Internet philanthropy has the potential to transform the philanthropic sector and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) was the key message highlighted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China at the launch of their new report today.

At the fifth Responsible Business Forum, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today called on business leaders to take a greater role in the new development era in order to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This Forum, opened in Singapore by UNDP and Global Initiatives, aims to address a sea change in the nature of development funding by creating a new partnership for sustainable development.

While foreign funding (Official Development Assistance) is still essential for the development system, it now accounts for 0.7 percent of total financial flows in Asia-Pacific (down from 13.5 percent in 1990), while domestic public and private finance accounts for 89 percent, according to a UNDP report launched last month.

To raise public awareness on the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and help China reach the goals and targets set forth by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) China today launched its Massive Open Online Course on Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals (UNDP SDG MOOC) developed in cooperation with NetEase Media, as the first knowledge product to combine the global Agenda and China’s current situation.

It is one year since every country in the world signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. They form a blueprint for addressing the most significant challenges facing our planet and its people. Challenges like climate change. This is likely to be the hottest year on record and here in Asia, climate change is a cause of the natural disasters that have claimed half a million lives in the last decade. Challenges like inequality, which has been growing for four-fifths of Asia-Pacific’s population over the last 20 years. Challenges brought on by the accelerating process of ageing, which will make it harder for many Asian states to provide basic services to their people. The 17 SDGs will address these challenges and other interlinked issues, including education, hunger and security. But governments cannot implement this blueprint on their own. Nor can the UN and other development organizations.

The High-Level Policy Forum on Global Governance is part of the Global Governance Initiative between UNDP China and the China Centre for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE) since 2012. Since then two high level policy forums were organised in 2012 and 2014. Two flagship reports (2013 and 2015) to summarise and elaborate the main ideas discussed at the forum have been published.

Mr. Nicholas Rosellini, newly-appointed UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative, presented his credentials to Mr. Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, on 25th October.

UNDP’s second flagship report on sustainable urban development has established models and methods for the evaluation of urban sustainable development based on the China Sustainable Cities Index, a quantitative and objective evaluation system to assist cities in assessing their sustainability performance based on UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), which has been applied to countries world-wide since 1990. Here it has been deployed at city level alongside the Urban Ecological Input Index (UEII), which measures resource consumption and pollution discharge.

Last December, more than 190 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) gathered in Paris to unanimously adopt the world's first binding climate agreement and to push the agreement quickly through the two thresholds required for entry into force in the coming year, 2016. The agreement highlights the political consensus among countries to deal with climate change, and released a clear signal for the global economy to decarbonization transition.

South-South cooperation in international development is now widely recognized as an important complement to North-South cooperation, and is rapidly growing as part of efforts in addressing climate change.

By Nicholas Rosellini, Designated United Nations Resident Coordinator in China. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Monday was a reminder that ending poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030 is an ambitious goal, but it's also an achievable goal.