Blog

The USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience is happy to share the launch of a new website aimed to provide coffee companies with the resources they need to combat climate change. The Climate Smart Coffee website, launched in early May, was created to increase private sector engagement and funding in smallholder farmer resilience against climate change.

• 07/02/2019
• Kaitlin Sampson

The new Financing the Climate-Health Nexus Tool from the Adaptation Thought Leadership and Assessment (ATLAS) project summarizes available sources of funding that are the most relevant and feasible for financing initiatives addressing climate risks to human health.

• 06/28/2019
• ATLAS

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

• 06/27/2019
• Isabela Barriga

Droughts are slow-onset disasters that trigger significant environmental impacts, including loss in agricultural productivity across the globe. The Lower Mekong region is no exception.

• 06/24/2019
• Farrukh Chishtie

Samantabai is a happy woman. The first 'super-champion' farmer in her village, she has been involved in the Climate-Smart Village (CSV) project under the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

• 06/21/2019
• Arun Khatri-Chhetri, Shalika Vyas

In November, I took a canoe trip down a rural western Madagascar river expecting to see a lot of lemurs, but instead I saw thousands of hectares of burned-down forest. The problem extends all over Madagascar, even encroaching on national parks.

• 06/18/2019
• Rob Cohen

Children with dirty hands. Long lines at public water points. Cholera sweeping through a densely populated settlement. In the short-term, these public health issues can often be solved through Water, Sanitation and Hygiene projects – WASH, for short.

• 06/17/2019
• SWP Team

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

The 2015 Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health final report, “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch,” begins: “Far-reaching changes to the structure and function of the Earth’s natural systems represent a growing threat to human health.”

• 06/13/2019
• Christine Chumbler

Malaria is a treatable and preventable disease, yet malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, or about 3000 children every day. Nearly 92 percent of these cases occur in Africa.

• 06/12/2019
• Fernanda Zermoglio, Sadie J. Ryan

The countries that share the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan – frequently experience agricultural, hydrological, meteorological, and socioeconomic droughts.

• 06/10/2019
• Agrilinks 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

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) needs a comprehensive map of development. The country holds the largest contiguous block of rainforest outside of Brazil, but as the map below illustrates, much of the remaining forest falls under mining, oil and logging permits.

• 05/31/2019
• Leo Bottrill

Landscapes and the complex, interlinked spatial units that comprise them are changing at an accelerating rate. Land use change, especially deforestation and forest degradation, are among the main contributors to global greenhouse emissions.

• 05/30/2019
• Ioana Bouvier, Silvia Petrova, Lovasoalalaina Parson