Public procurement is a powerful yet underused tool for shaping markets. In the European Union, it represents around 15% of GDP and is linked to roughly 11% of greenhouse gas emissions—giving public authorities strong leverage to influence how companies compete and what kinds of products and business models succeed. At a time of geopolitical uncertainty, industrial rivalry, and climate change, this market power is becoming more important. In that context, local content requirements (LCRs), or Made in Europe requirements, have been one of the central themes of the debate on procurement reform. 

Well-designed LCRs can support resilience, clean industry, and low-carbon markets. When combined with robust environmental requirements, they can help reduce emissions, improve circularity, and create lead markets for more sustainable products—particularly in heavy industries such as steel and cement, where decarbonization has progressed slowly despite years of effort. But if LCRs are too broad or too rigid, they can increase costs, reduce competition, add legal and administrative complexity, and create tensions with international trade partners. Origin criteria alone, without ambitious environmental standards, risk entrenching high-emitting producers rather than driving clean industrial transformation. 

The report examines how domestic preference rules can be defined and how they are used in India, Canada, and China. The report maps their main risks and opportunities, identifies the conditions under which LCRs can effectively support clean lead markets, and explores their application in the steel, concrete, and clean technology sectors. The report concludes with four recommendations for policy-makers on advancing Made in Europe requirements in the context of the Industrial Accelerator Act and the future EU Public Procurement Act.

Across the Canadian Prairies, water carries memory, identity, responsibility, and life. Yet the voices of those most deeply connected to it are often absent from climate and water policy discussions. 

Through Stories of Resilience: Water, the Natural Infrastructure for Water Solutions (NIWS) initiative and The Resilience Institute (TRI) are helping change that. This digital story map brings forward the experiences of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people from across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—sharing deeply personal reflections on water, climate change, stewardship, and resilience. 

The stories reveal water as far more than infrastructure or a resource to manage. Participants speak of rivers as lifelines, lakes as relatives, and water as a living being that connects families, cultures, and generations. They also describe the growing pressures facing Prairie communities, from drought and wildfire to ecosystem loss and changing watersheds, while highlighting community-led responses rooted in Indigenous knowledge, restoration, and care for the land. 

For the International Institute for Sustainable Development, this work is part of a broader effort to support more inclusive and resilient water futures across the Prairies. By elevating voices too often overlooked in environmental decision making, Stories of Resilience: Water challenges us to rethink our relationship with water—and with each other. 

Like tributaries flowing into a larger watershed, each story contributes to a growing collective understanding of what resilience can look like in a changing climate.

Significant infrastructure deficits in municipalities across North America indicate that infrastructure is being expanded at an unsustainable rate. At the same time, governments are faced with the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

This report examines how urban development patterns influence both the fiscal and environmental costs of car-oriented infrastructure. Low-density growth patterns often generate insufficient tax revenue to cover their full life-cycle infrastructure costs, contributing to long-term municipal liabilities, while also reinforcing car dependency and higher emissions. The research explores how fiscal impact analysis, infrastructure planning, and land-use policy can be better integrated to support more financially and environmentally sustainable development outcomes.

Critical minerals are essential to the global energy transition, digitalization, and industrial development. But the race to secure minerals such as cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, and nickel also risks deepening long-standing gender inequalities in the mining sector. 

This IGF report, developed in partnership with the ILO and the UNDP, examines how the expansion of critical mineral extraction can affect women’s rights, particularly for Indigenous women, rural women, and women living in mining-affected communities. It looks at how environmental impacts, the location of mineral reserves, and accelerated permitting processes can increase risks related to land, livelihoods, food security, health, unpaid care work, safety, employment, consultation, and benefit sharing. 

The report also identifies practical actions for governments and mining companies to make critical minerals governance more gender-responsive. These include integrating intersectional gender analysis into impact assessments, ensuring inclusive consultation and women’s meaningful participation, respecting free, prior, and informed consent, and establishing benefit-sharing mechanisms that expand women’s access to decent work, compensation, community development, and economic opportunities. 

By placing gender equality at the centre of critical minerals governance, the publication argues that the transition to a low-carbon and digital future can become an opportunity to advance women’s rights, strengthen accountability, and support more inclusive and sustainable mineral development with gender-responsive policies in place.

Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves, with an estimated 55 million tonnes. It has been the world’s leading producer of nickel over the past few years, with a global production share of 16% in 2017 rising to 54% in 2023, when it produced 2.02 million tonnes of nickel. 

The conclusions and lessons learned from this case study can be used to guide more sustainable nickel laterite mining and processing in Indonesia as well as other jurisdictions.

Governments in developing countries and regions are adopting VSSs in export promotion measures to ensure exported products meet sustainability-related market requirements, while also expanding trading opportunities for producers, women, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.

This report examines how integrating VSSs into national regulatory and sectoral systems can drive export-promotion outcomes. It provides insights into how governments are developing measures to support the use of VSSs in key sectors to increase access to markets and to help producers adopt and maintain more sustainable production practices. The report presents examples from four countries that have integrated or supported the use of VSSs for export promotion, highlighting lessons learned, benefits for producers, key successes and challenges, and emerging best practices.  

These four cases demonstrate that despite challenges, a structured, well-supported collaboration among governments, industry, and VSS organizations can drive both market access and more sustainable production practices. This report concludes with actionable recommendations for policy-makers to effectively address emerging challenges and risks linked to the use of VSSs in export-promotion measures and the broader implications of evolving sustainability-related policies in importing countries. 

Greenwashing has become a growing policy concern as businesses increasingly market products, services, and practices using environmental claims. Misleading or unsubstantiated claims can weaken consumer trust, distort competition, and undermine genuine sustainability efforts. In response, governments around the world are introducing new rules to improve the reliability of environmental information in the marketplace. 

This report provides a comparative overview of regulatory responses to greenwashing in Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the European Union, France, India, Kenya, Peru, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It reviews how countries are using different policy tools, including consumer protection and competition law, sector-specific legislation, advertising standards, and upcoming specific greenwashing proposals. 

The mapping reveals significant progress. Most jurisdictions now embed core principles—truthfulness, clarity, substantiation, and transparency—into their regulatory frameworks. At the same time, persistent gaps remain. Pathways to credible evidence are often underspecified, leaving companies uncertain about what counts as adequate substantiation. Data collection along complex value chains remains a major implementation challenge, particularly for smallholders and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). And while many regulations recognize third-party certifications and VSSs as admissible evidence, few clearly define the criteria that make such schemes credible. 

The report argues that effective greenwashing regulation must balance credibility with inclusiveness. It offers recommendations across three areas: 

• strengthen the design of substantiation requirements and adopt proportionate approaches to reflect differences in company size, sector, and position in the value chain,
• enable implementation by investing in data infrastructure and producer support, combining enforcement with guidance and consumer awareness, and promoting cooperation and experience sharing, and
• support compliance by clarifying the role of VSSs through recognition criteria rather than endorsements of specific schemes. 

Together, these recommendations point toward regulatory responses that empower consumers, support producers, and promote credible sustainability markets globally.

The Bogotá River is essential to central Colombia, providing drinking water for nearly 6 million people across 46 municipalities and supporting agriculture and industry across Cundinamarca. Rapid urban growth, untreated wastewater, and the loss of wetlands degraded water quality and increased flood risks. Extreme events, such as the 2010–2011 floods, highlighted the limits of traditional flood protection approaches. 

To address these challenges, the World Bank and the Corporación Autónoma Regional de Cundinamarca funded a major restoration project combining conventional infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment and hydraulic works, with NBI interventions, including wetland restoration and river rehabilitation. 

These interventions improved water quality, restored natural flood buffers, and increased the river's capacity to manage high flows. The project closed in December 2022. 

The NBI Global Resource Centre conducted a SAVi assessment to examine the long-term performance of these investments over a 50-year period at the basin scale. 

Results show that hybrid infrastructure delivers strong economic returns when the full range of benefits is considered. The project generates USD 1.27 in benefits for every USD 1 invested, with total net benefits of USD 349 million. Avoided flood damage represents a major share of this value, with an estimated USD 828 million in avoided losses to homes and businesses. 

In addition to financial returns, the project strengthened climate resilience and improved environmental quality and living conditions for millions of people. The findings highlight the role of hybrid infrastructure as a cost-effective strategy for river basin management, delivering integrated economic, social, and environmental benefits.

The climate and biodiversity crises are closely interconnected, yet national policies often address them separately, leading to fragmented approaches. This policy analysis highlights the need for stronger integration and defines synergies as the intentional coordination of planning and implementation across NDCs, NAPs, and NBSAPs to achieve more effective outcomes and co-benefits. 

Focusing on Mongolia, the report begins by outlining the institutional landscape for climate and biodiversity, along with the current status of key national policies. This is followed by a synergies assessment, which examines how Mongolia’s NDC, NAP, and NBSAP intersect, highlighting shared objectives, targets, indicators, activities, stakeholders, sectors, potential trade-offs, and gaps. It then explores the potential challenges, gaps, and barriers that could hinder deeper integration and the development of effective synergies. The final section highlights actionable opportunities and strategic entry points to enhance alignment and strengthen coordination across Mongolia’s climate and biodiversity frameworks. 

The analysis was guided by the Effectively Delivering on Climate and Nature: NDCs, NAPs and NBSAPs Synergies checklist. It aims to inform national focal points; NDC, NAP, and NBSAP policy-makers and planners; and civil society organizations in Mongolia working to align their climate and biodiversity policies and actions to seek more effective outcomes and multiple and co-benefits.

For decades, tax incentives have been a central feature of investment promotion strategies across the developing world. National investment laws have become the favoured vehicle for granting these incentives, particularly in least developed countries, where they form the primary legal basis for tax incentives in more than half of all cases. 

Despite their prevalence, little attention has been paid to how these incentives are governed: Who decides their design? Who grants them, and on what basis? How do they interact with other instruments granting tax incentives? Who monitors whether they achieve their stated objectives? And what institutional arrangements exist to ensure accountability when they do not? 

This report sets out to answer those questions. Drawing on a survey of 105 investment laws from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, complemented by interviews with government officials, the report maps the current landscape of tax incentives in investment laws across emerging markets and developing economies: their prevalence, their design, their interaction with other legal instruments, and the governance structure that surrounds them. 

By examining how tax incentives are embedded in investment laws and the governance challenges that arise, the report aims to foster a more coordinated approach between institutions that promote investment and those that safeguard public revenue. Ultimately, it seeks to support a shared understanding of the role that tax incentives should play in attracting sustainable investment, building a common vision that promotes quality investment while contributing fully to domestic resource mobilization.