UN Habitat entered into a co-operation with WASTE to produce the UN-Habitat Third Global Report on Water and Sanitation in the World’s cities. The resulting book, entitled “Solid Waste in the World’s Cities,” won the 2010 publications prize from the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA).
The volume, the product of a combined effort of more than 25 professionals on solid waste from developing, transitional, and developed countries, is designed to raise and address questions of policy, good and bad practice, sustainable financing, and the role of governance in making waste management fair and effective. Specific ambitions were to:
- make a significant contribution to the global community of practice working on sustainable and fair modernisation of solid waste management, generally represented by the term integrated sustainable waste management, or iswm
- create a document that serves both the information and policy needs of decision-makers and the professional needs of practitioners for information on global institutional, technical, and financial practice
- complement and supplement the existing offer of literature, toolkits, studies, research reports and the like, and where possible update the information in seminal publications from the 1990s.
- create a frame of reference for (re)defining the main lines of thought about good practice in solid waste management, and a broad constituency for using this frame of reference
- confront head-on the taboos and problems that every practitioner encounters, but that seldom make their way into print media because of their controversial nature, and
- treat cities in developed and developing countries in the same way, and broaden existing frameworks to permit and facilitate this.
Actual Services provided by our staff:
- Assemble an editorial team, a city selection method, a set of metrics, and a framework for data collection
- Prepare an annotated outline of the report and discuss it within the community of practice
- Facilitation of two Planning/ Expert Group Meetings, including identification of the experts Review and analyze all existing information, statistics and case studies
- Commissioning of Case Studies and background papers
- Prepare and submit first draft
- Prepare and submit final manuscript for graphic design and production