Blog

BiodiversityLinks, USAID’s newly refreshed and relaunched knowledge portal for biodiversity conservation, features key USAID tools and resources, as well as new evidence and learning.

• 03/09/2021
• Climatelinks

Congratulations to the 13 winners of the 2020 Climatelinks Photo Contest!

This year’s theme, “Healthy Forests for a Healthy Future,” focuses on nature-based solutions to climate change such as active reforestation, plantations, agroforestry, and natural regeneration. The winning photos tell the stories of individual and community change agents for sustainable development, forest protection, and a climate-secure future.

• 01/25/2021
• Steve Hardeman

In mid-2020, Climatelinks added sector pages to its website. The 14 pages, accessible by hovering your mouse over “What We Do” in the website’s top navigation menu, showcase sector-specific work on climate change that USAID is undertaking in a variety of contexts. Each sector page houses an introductory overview detailing related climate impacts and stressors, as well as potential solutions.

• 12/30/2020
• Stephan Hardeman

Photos are a great way to not only capture climate programming in action, but to tell one’s story. The Climatelinks photo gallery has more than 230 photos depicting climate and development, from gender and inclusion to natural resource management.
Below are the five most popular photos of 2020. Let us know if you have a favorite photo.

• 12/29/2020
• Isabela Barriga

Resilience—the ability to manage through crisis without compromising future well-being—is increasingly recognized as an essential part of global development. Droughts, flooding, severe price fluctuations, and other shocks and crises threaten hard-won development gains and cost millions of dollars in humanitarian assistance each year. As a changing climate makes extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable, it is more urgent than ever that we understand how to effectively build individual, household, and community resilience.

• 03/10/2020
• Courtney Meyer

Games provide players a low-risk opportunity to explore future impacts of climate change that can lead to innovative solutions. Simulating climate change and including a complicated set of factors and variables that need to be addressed over time can draw important insights and spur new ways of thinking without spending money.

• 02/12/2020
• Isabela Barriga

Amid growing recognition that climate change is not just an environmental issue, but a concern in all sectors, USAID’s adaptation investments are helping the Agency and its partners more effectively assess, plan for, and manage climate risks.

• 12/19/2019
• Erin Martin

The Climatelinks photo contest received an impressive total of 170 submissions from the Climatelinks community, representing more than 40 countries.

• 12/03/2019
• Steve Hardeman

This October, Climatelinks is focusing on games for development, and we would like to hear from you! Games can take a variety of forms, from in-person tabletop games to web-based or mobile applications.

• 10/08/2019
• Climatelinks

The Dominican Republic is one of the world’s ten most climate-vulnerable countries and experiences significant gender inequality in the Latin America and Caribbean region. The combination of these issues can threaten the health, safety, and livelihood of women and girls, who are often directly on the frontlines of impacts.

• 07/10/2019
• Jamie Wen-Besson

Global environmental changes such as landscape conversions alter natural systems and can increase contact between humans and other species.

• 06/27/2019
• Isabela Barriga

Women in Nepal used to walk to the forest to collect loads of heavy firewood for cooking. The task itself was burdensome, and the resulting smoke from the fires they built at home often caused respiratory problems.

• 06/14/2019
• WWF Team

This year’s World Environment Day theme focuses on a global challenge with pressing implications on human health and the environment: air pollution.

• 06/05/2019
• Isabela Barriga

This month saw the release of a dire UN report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warning that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. 

• 06/04/2019
• Agrilinks

Extreme heat is often referred to as a “silent killer.” Its impacts are not starkly visible like the destruction caused by a flood or hurricane, but it can be equally catastrophic. For example, a 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 55,000 people.

• 05/01/2019
• Joslin Isaacson