Blog

In the Dominican Republic, USAID works to jointly promote climate adaptation and resilience to address a lack of adequate sanitation and wastewater treatment facilities, which limits the population’s access to clean water and presents a key threat to the country’s coastal biodiversity in the form of untreated sewage. USAID/Dominican Republic originally implemented the Climate Adaptation: Climate Risk Reduction activity using only climate change adaptation funding.

• 04/08/2020
• USAID Biodiversity Integration Case Studies

Indonesia is considered a “mega-diverse” country and is home to unique ecosystems and species, including orangutans, tigers, rhinoceros, elephants, and birds of paradise. The country has a high rate of endemism and contains important terrestrial ecosystems, such as mangroves, lowland forests, peatland, swamp forests, and montane forests.

• 04/03/2020
•  James Halperin,  Reed Merrill

Since 2012, the USAID Vietnam Forests and Deltas program (VFD) has been helping the Government of Vietnam develop and operationalize a national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) program that has already directed over USD $500 million to forest owners as financial compensation for maintaining forest cover. For example, Vietnam’s hydroelectric power plants now reward upstream forest owners whose trees keep soil in place, avoiding the sediment buildup that drives up operating costs.

• 03/19/2020
• Lauren Keller

The tropical air hangs over the Sierra Leonean coastal village of Gbongboma like a moist towel. Musa Lahai sits in an enclave of thatched huts, surrounded by women and children sitting around two cooking fires. Orange flames lick the sides of several large kettles of fish stew. Each fish was hard to come by. “Before, we were catching good fish. Now, we’re not,” Lahai says. He is deputy chief of the village, where approximately 90 people survive off earth’s bounties, from harvesting oysters, to deep sea fishing, to farming and growing palm fruit.

• 03/12/2020
• David Goodman

Southwest Bangladesh is a watery world. Houses perch on steep river banks. Storms pummel fragile coastlines. It’s hard not to see this starkly beautiful place as engaged in a battle between water and land — with the water winning. But the land has a new ally, a living hem of mangrove forests made possible by Winrock International’s Climate Resilient Ecosystems and Livelihoods (CREL) project, funded by USAID.

• 03/05/2020
• Winrock International

The Rainforest Alliance is implementing the USAID-supported Alliance for Sustainable Landscapes and Markets project in the states of Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Quintana Roo, Mexico. This alliance involves groups of producers, nonprofit organizations, public institutions, enterprises, and consumers in taking actions towards a better future where people and nature thrive in harmony.

• 02/26/2020
• Graciela Zavala

The cocoa industry has taken bold steps to preventing deforestation in the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI), a public private collaboration between 33 cocoa and chocolate companies (85% of the industry), the governments of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and led by the World Cocoa Foundation and the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH). This effort is based on the pillars of preventing deforestation, which include protection and renovation of forests, sustainable and climate smart cocoa production and social inclusion and protection.

• 02/18/2020
• Agrilinks

Advancing the field of climate change adaptation requires insight from diverse perspectives, active learning, and creative partnerships. Since 2014, USAID’s Adaptation Community Meetings (ACMs) have served as a platform to share knowledge for climate adaptation and resilience and promote integrated programming.

• 01/23/2020
• Isabela Barriga

Research[1] demonstrates that when environmental conditions worsen, the treatment of women and girls worsens. Agriculture has significant impact on the environment that can increase environmental degradation. As communities in environmentally-precarious situations face stress, gender-based violence (GBV) is a negative coping strategy that perpetrators sometimes use to reassert control over women’s bodies and minds.

• 01/10/2020
• Meredith Perry

The recent forest fires in Brazil and Bolivia showed once more that traditional approaches to sustainable development and nature conservation are not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions from land use and stop the ongoing destruction of natural resources.

• 01/07/2020
• Ruben Coppus

During 2019, the Climatelinks community contributed over 100 resources on a wide range of topics, from clean cook stoves to sustainable forest management.

• 12/12/2019
• Stephan Hardeman

The Climatelinks photo contest received an impressive total of 170 submissions from the Climatelinks community, representing more than 40 countries.

• 12/03/2019
• Steve Hardeman

South America may be sitting, unaware, on a pile of climate gold, ammunition in efforts to forestall global warming. New maps of tropical and subtropical peatlands suggest these carbon-rich wetlands are more widespread in South America than on any other continent, with significant deposits in the Andean mountains.

• 11/25/2019
• CIFOR

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

As part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, member countries must submit national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventories, estimating how much carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases they are producing each year.

• 07/23/2019
• Christine Chumbler