UNITED NATIONS (CMC) — The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has presented an initiative to create a Regional Center for Governance of natural resources in the region.

“Greater and better governance of natural resources is necessary to fulfil the goals of sustainable development,” said ECLAC’s Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena during a side event to the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

“This necessitates moving towards greater efficiency in the use of material resources, particularly non-renewable natural resources,” she added.

The senior United Nations official headed a meeting, entitled ‘How to leave no one behind: Sustainable Natural Resource Management’, which was organised by the International Resource Panel (IRP) — an entity comprising prominent scientists and experts on natural resources in which Bárcena serves as co-chair, and which is part of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“The current patterns of production and consumption are unsustainable. The use of resources must be decoupled from growth and these patterns must be changed,” stressed Alicia Bárcena, adding that industrialised countries with more mastery of technology should create incentives and lead the transition towards that decoupling.

She also insisted that both public and private investment and technology portfolios are needed, according to ECLAC.

Bárcena said the exploitation of natural resources and the associated emissions and waste have accelerated in the last decade.

“For that reason, we must reorient the governance of natural resources extraction with the goal of maximising its contribution to sustainable development at all levels and complying with the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” she said. “They depend on the governance of natural resources.”

This governance entails regulating ownership, the forms of appropriation and the distribution of the profits reaped from natural resources, “so that society as a whole can benefit from their exploitation,” ECLAC said.

Bárcena said the recent “supercycle” of increased commodities prices, which lasted for 15 years, has come to an end.

“Analysing price trends can help improve macroeconomic policies and, therefore, this is a key element for the new governance of natural resources,” she said.

In this nexus, ECLAC’s Executive Secretary proposed the creation of the Regional Centre for Governance of Natural Resources in Latin America and the Caribbean, saying that it could serve as a regional platform — the only one of its kind under the auspices of the United Nations — to co-ordinate, analyse and lead discussions and dissemination activities on these matters, while also providing technical assistance to member countries.

Bárcena also referred to the role of megacities in the region and the need to move towards sustainable urbanisation.

She emphasised that “the city must be seen as a priority objective in the strategy for progressive structural change”.

She noted that more than 80 per cent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lives in cities, “making the region the most urbanised in the world”.

ECLAC said the opportunities and challenges posed by these issues will be addressed during the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) to be held in October in Quito, Ecuador.

During the event, the IRP unveiled an advance copy of its report,

Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity.

The report presents various ways in which the world can maintain economic growth and increase human development, while also reducing the amount of primary materials that it uses to achieve this, according to ECLAC.