Blog

With climate change exacerbating the number and intensity of weather-related natural disasters like typhoons and floods, it is important that communities prepare for when a disaster hits. We need to think through what to do during an emergency, and how to reduce its negative long-term impacts.

• 09/02/2020
• Christine Chumbler

While at first glance the relationship between education and climate change may not be clear, a number of challenges and opportunities become apparent when the two are considered together. Climate change education is highly relevant to youth, who will grapple with the impacts of climate change for decades to come.

• 09/01/2020
• Stephan Hardeman

Deforestation, forest degradation, poaching, and environmental problems caused by climate change pose serious threats to many of West Africa’s already fragile ecosystems, including the region’s biodiversity-rich forests. Award-winning international journalist David Goodman learned about the severity of these threats as he traveled to the countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia to document the work of the USAID-funded West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC) Program.

• 08/26/2020
• West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change program

There is great value in pushing for youth education in climate change action. Designing projects that focus on issues youth care about can lead to unexpected, positive outcomes. And engaging youth as active participants with the autonomy and agency to act can have lasting effects long after a development project ends.

• 08/25/2020
• Mike Thayer

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

Postcards from the field feature submissions to the Climatelinks photo gallery. This photo was submitted to the “Planning a food-secure future” category of the 2019 Climatelinks photo contest.

• 08/18/2020
• Climatelinks

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

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

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

To enable scaling of climate programs, development assistance organizations can help partner countries leverage new sources of financing, including institutional investors, impact investors, and international and domestic capital markets. However, new approaches are necessary to achieve impacts on a much larger scale.

• 07/29/2020
• 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

Vanilla. It’s one of the world’s great flavors and scents, coveted for centuries for use in everything from baked goods to soaps. And it is also helping expand tree cover in Indonesia. Indonesia’s islands have been inhabited for millennia. Dramatic increases in population over the last few decades and more recent expansions of unsustainable industrial agriculture have shifted what had been a system in balance.

• 07/21/2020
• Christine Chumbler

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have provided clear guidance on the most critical measure we can all take to protect human health and reduce the spread of COVID-19: “Hands should be washed with soap and water.” While clear and simple, this directive is far from attainable for the 3 billion people around the world who lack access to soap and safe water at home.

• 07/17/2020
• Evan Thomas, Doris Kaberia