Blog

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

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

In 2020, the Climatelinks community focused on a broad range of monthly themes, including disaster risk management, private sector engagement, energy, and sustainable landscapes. Below you’ll find a selection of great stories that were not as heavily viewed, and that you may have missed when they were originally posted:

• 12/23/2020
• Stephan Hardeman

Over the course of 2020, the Climatelinks community contributed over 120 blogs on topics varying from mangrove restoration in coastal Sierra Leone to flood early warning systems in East Java, Indonesia. Below are the five most visited blogs of 2020.

• 12/15/2020
• Stephan Hardeman

The majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and they continue to grow by more than 75 million people per year. Cities, especially rapidly growing cities, are likely to be the driving economic force in many countries, even more so than they are now.

• 12/01/2020
• Stephan Hardeman, Colin Quinn

This is the second of three blogs examining the issues of the COVID-19 pandemic for sustainable landscape programs. The first blog discusses how deforestation and forest fragmentation can increase the likelihood of future pandemics.

• 11/24/2020
• Eric Haxthausen

Stacks of sustainable charcoal produced at Mampu cooperative site outside of Kinshasa visited as part of a scoping mission looking at alternative local species to integrate into agroforestry woodfuel systems to increase the volume of sustainable charcoal supply for urban areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, carried out by the U.S. Forest Service International Programs and supported by USAID’s Africa Bureau in July 2018.

• 11/18/2020
• Climatelinks

Originating in Turkey, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers traditionally have met the vast majority of Iraq’s water needs. The rivers are used to pump water into millions of homes and irrigate the historic Mesopotamia agricultural fields.

• 11/17/2020
• Owen Scott

There is a wealth of options to consider when financing urban infrastructure. Some of these include but are not limited to: public-private partnership models; user fees or other domestically mobilized resources; loans from commercial or multilateral development banks; grants from facilities like the Green Climate Fund; or contributions from local businesses.

• 11/12/2020
• Max Lohmann

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

This is the first of three blogs examining the lessons and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for sustainable landscapes programs. At a time when everyone is focused on the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) some might think that ongoing efforts to support programming in sustainable landscapes have little to offer at the current moment.

• 10/19/2020
• Eric Haxthausen

Natural disasters don’t discriminate based on age. Everyone in a community is affected when a typhoon hits, from the youngest to the oldest. Given that climate change is driving an increase in the number and severity of storms, floods, and drought, even young children need to learn to be prepared.

• 10/14/2020
• Christine Chumbler

Residents of Guatemala’s dry corridor are hungry. In 2018, drought-related crop failures directly affected one in 10 Guatemalans and caused extreme food shortage for upwards of 840,000 people according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Thousands of Guatemalans support and feed their families with subsistence farming and the alarming climate trends of the dry corridor are making each year harder to survive.

• 10/06/2020
• Agrilinks