Blog

The five-year Paramos & Forests Activity is helping the Government of Colombia meet its landscape-based climate change mitigation goals and strengthening local economic development.

• 02/23/2022
• Christine Chumbler

Leveraging the learning generated from USAID’s portfolio of climate change and blended and innovative finance programs, and drawing lessons from other leaders in the space, USAID aims to facilitate additional investment into meaningful development projects that contribute significantly to climate change targets.

• 10/20/2021
• Sashi Jayatileke

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

The amount of development assistance available for clean energy, sustainable landscapes, and climate adaptation investment is relatively small. Partner governments have multiple urgent and competing needs for public expenditures, recently exacerbated by the global pandemic and recession.

• 08/19/2020
• Dr. Eric Hyman

Half the world’s total mangrove deforestation since 2000 has taken place in Indonesia, where the main driver is conversion for shrimp ponds. A new cost-benefit analysis by the USAID-funded Climate Economic Analysis Development, Investment, and Resilience (CEADIR) Activity sheds light on the financial and economic value of mangrove conservation, including impacts on near-shore fishing and greenhouse gas emissions.

• 08/11/2020
• Dr. Eric Hyman

One of the major challenges in monitoring forests is identifying forest degradation processes. Degradation events can be “small, subtle, and temporary,” making their identification difficult. However, recent years have seen advancements in satellite remote sensing technology, which has in turn revealed changed patterns of illegal deforestation activity in the Amazon rainforest.

• 07/24/2020
• Kelsey E. Herndon, Africa I. Flores-Anderson

This month we are exploring what it means to build local capacity to address climate change. Building local capacity starts with an understanding of the local stakeholders’ needs.

• 09/10/2019
• Isabela Barriga

Measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) are essential for transparency between countries as they track their greenhouse gas emissions. By emphasizing common standards, MRV ensures that countries are on the same page when it comes to the methodologies they use.

• 08/01/2019
• Stephan Hardeman

Many countries have committed to establishing national forest monitoring and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems, but lack the technical capacity to achieve their goals. As the science of forest monitoring and MRV advances, these countries face challenges identifying and implementing cost-effective tools and methods that suit their long-term needs.

• 07/30/2019
• Moses Jackson

This month, Climatelinks is featuring geospatial tools and analysis. When it comes to climate change, geospatial tools and analysis provide innovative methods of visualizing drivers, threats and impacts. Emerging trends can also be identified and studied through geospatial analysis, which in turn allows for more strategic positioning of resources.

• 05/10/2019
• Stephan Hardeman

Integrating biodiversity and sustainable landscapes objectives in development programming can increase the sustainability of interventions, amplify results and reduce costs. ‘Integrating Biodiversity and Sustainable Landscapes in USAID Programming’ highlights these and other key considerations for USAID staff and development practitioners interested in connections between biodiversity and sustainable landscapes priorities.

• 04/23/2019
• Catherine Wahlen, Jennifer Kane

A new land cover tool originally developed for southeast Asia is now being expanded globally. “Land cover mapping in the Lower Mekong has been challenging in the past, based primarily on outdated maps using different criteria,” said Dr. David Saah, Professor at the University of San Francisco and Managing Principal of the Spatial Informatics Group (SIG).

• 04/10/2019
• Devrin Weiss, Leah Kucera

In the West Gonja and Sene districts of northern and central Ghana, respectively, deforestation caused by charcoal production is affecting sustainable livelihoods.

• 10/18/2018
• SERVIR