Blog

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

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

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

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

In 2015, India set an ambitious goal of creating a sink of as much as 3 billion tons of carbon by 2030. To do that, the country will need to increase tree cover by 10 million hectares and enhance forest stocks on a further 10 million hectares—about one-quarter the total area of California—which is a huge task.

• 07/15/2020
• Christine Chumbler

Implementors of international development projects as well as countries around the world increasingly recognize the private sector as a key partner to meet development and policy goals. But in order to make these collaborations most effective, there are best practices that all parties should follow, such as having a shared objective, equally investing in the relationship, and setting clear expectations.

• 06/24/2020
• Jennifer Park, Jonathan Schwarz

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a global system that certifies responsible forest management. In some cases, FSC has severed ties with, or “disassociated” from, paper and timber giants worldwide when their direct or affiliate operations have harmed forests and people.

• 06/09/2020
• Natcha Tulyasuwan, Binod Chapagain, Panicha Chandragholica

A pivotal insight emerging from three years of co-creating climate-smart business models with companies—both investors and those seeking investment—is that there is not one private sector, but a multitude of actors with varied incentives, timelines, and decision processes. Each requires a targeted approach; any strategy that assumes one homogeneous private sector—or one investor profile—will struggle to gain traction.

• 05/21/2020
• Yohann Formont

Worldwide, local communities in the tropics and subtropics control 22 percent of the forest carbon in those regions. For several decades, development organizations have promoted sustainable forest use approaches to help communities manage these forests. One such approach is the establishment of community-based forestry enterprises (CBFEs) that sell forest products or services.

• 05/19/2020
• Mark Donahue, Ian Deshmukh

The world’s natural capital—such as water, land, forests, soil, wildlife, and fisheries—safeguards and underpins the health and well-being of billions of people. At the same time, natural resources are facing unprecedented threats in the form of pollution, habitat loss, and extinction. Together, these threats can impact long-term economic growth, livelihood opportunities, and the ecosystem services that support human well-being.

• 05/04/2020
• Stephan Hardeman

Nearly two-thirds of what remains of West Africa’s rainforests are in Liberia. But will that always be the case? Deforestation at the hands of humans once posed the biggest threat. Now climate change is exacerbating the challenge to protect forests and biodiversity. As chief of party of the USAID-funded Forest Incomes for Environmental Sustainability (FIFES) Activity, I’ve seen how our activity, implemented by ACDI/VOCA, is succeeding in this fight to protect forests and forest-dependent communities.

• 04/29/2020
• Glenn Lines

Biodiversity conservation is essential to development––across multiple sectors, geographies, and contexts. Geospatial analysis can support integration of biodiversity conservation with a range of sectors at USAID, including climate change, and a new guide, developed by USAID’s Office of Forestry and Biodiversity and the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, explains how.

• 04/23/2020
• Mark Higgins