Blog

Climatelinks has a new design and updated content – just in time for the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. The site has been revamped to better meet the needs of the USAID, its climate and development partners, and the climate community around the world. 

• 02/17/2021
• Climatelinks

This is the final of three blogs examining the lessons and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for sustainable landscape programs.

• 02/12/2021
• Eric Haxthausen

As a boy growing up on the outskirts of Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park, Koren Gren spent his days surrounded by the natural world. Today, he still does.

• 01/15/2021
• Winrock International

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

Landfills and wastewater treatment plants generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas (GHG), from decomposing organic waste and wastewater treatment processes, respectively. What if there were ways to reduce GHG emissions while simultaneously creating renewable energy? And what if there were additional benefits beyond reducing emissions and creating energy?

• 12/04/2020
• Peter Nash

According to USAID’s Southern Africa’s Climate Change Risk Profile, “Changes in water quality and availability will be the dominant changes seen under a new climate.” The sensitivity of livelihoods and economies to these changes, together with a lack of access to drinking water (and contamination of existing supply), threatens water security and resilience in a region where water demands are rising in response to an increasing population.

• 11/10/2020
• Suvritha Rampha, Steve Collins

Armenia’s Ararat Valley, a 1,177 square-kilometer swath of land located to the east of Mount Ararat, is home to critical artesian aquifers and central to the country’s economic stability. The aquifers are a frequently tapped resource for public services, agriculture, and fish farming, as well as cooling of Armenia’s nuclear power plant.

• 10/27/2020
• Jamie Carson, Elizabeth Hutchison

Complex relationships between the climate, population growth, land cover change, and other interactions make decisions on land use planning, water permitting, and donor investments in natural resources management challenging. Decision-making on how and where to make investments is improving in Tanzania due to development partners becoming more proficient in using sophisticated environmental analysis tools such as composite index mapping.

• 10/08/2020
• Leif Kindberg, John Whiting

Forests cover 69 million hectares in Peru, representing nearly 60 percent of the country (MINAM 2014). Loreto and Ucayali are the two largest Amazon regions in Peru and are traditionally occupied and protected by Indigenous Peoples. These communities have ancestral ties to Amazon forests in Peru and are important allies in supporting sustainable forest management.

• 09/09/2020
• Isabela Barriga

This post is written by Arely Valdivia, Communications Coordinator for CIAT Nicaragua, and was originally published on the CCAFS website. The women of the municipality of Namasigue, Honduras, have found empowerment in the Local Technical Agroclimatic Committee (LTAC) of the municipality of Choluteca.

• 09/03/2020
• Agrilinks

Why do many community-based forestry enterprises (CBFEs) perform poorly even after years of donor and government investment? This was one of the questions that motivated a USAID Productive Landscape (ProLand) project investigation into CBFEs as a strategy for improving land management.

• 08/14/2020
• Mark Donahue, Ian Deshmukh

“Climate change does not drive conflict in a vacuum but contributes to conflict in already fragile contexts and in combination with a number of other critical factors.” This is one of five themes to emerge from a literature review as reported in a new study, which critically assesses how peacebuilding programming can also produce adaptation benefits (and vice versa).

• 08/11/2020
• Christine Chumbler

Competition for natural resources such as water, land, and forests can be a source of contention, and sometimes even violence. Climate change can exacerbate these issues by impacting resource availability and quality. As climate variability increases, so will its potential to worsen conflict. 

• 08/10/2020
• Isabela Barriga

Open, transparent, and competitive renewable energy procurement, coupled with declining prices for solar and wind technologies, has facilitated billions of dollars of investment at record low prices. According to the Renewables 2020 Global Status Report, 109 countries around the world had held renewable energy auctions by 2019, up from 98 in 2018. Worldwide, auctions have become an emerging best practice to procure least-cost energy.

• 08/04/2020
• Sarah Lawson, Araí Monteforte

Long-term changes in climate and wildlife habitat can pose significant effects on human health and increase the risk of infectious diseases like the coronavirus (COVID-19). Several of the roots of climate change can increase the risk of pandemics; for example, deforestation increasingly places humans and animals in contact, which enables pathogens from animals to spillover to humans.

• 07/08/2020
• Isabela Barriga