Blog

One of South Africa’s largest and most well-known cities, Cape Town, has dominated headlines since the beginning of the year as the dreaded Day Zero approaches: the day when the city’s reservoirs go below a critical threshold and the city will turn off municipal water supply to many homes and businesses. 

• 02/16/2018
• Jeremy Gorelick

Hosted by the African Union, the inaugural African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology (AMCOMET) - Africa Hydromet Forum brought together more than 500 policy makers to discuss and identify priority areas for improving CIS and building regional climate resilience.

• 02/15/2018
• Climatelinks

A USAID/Colombia program that concluded in 2017 saved manufacturing facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to an assessment of the environmental benefits and cost savings associated with the project’s energy efficiency interventions.

• 02/08/2018
• Derina Man, John Venezia, Kevin Kurkul

Senegal is taking a sectoral approach to its National Adaptation Planning (NAP) process with the development of sectoral NAPs. This process was first successfully completed in 2016 in one of the pillars of the country’s economy: the fisheries sector.

• 02/07/2018
• Dr. Khady Sané Diouf, Fatou Thiaw

Government of Bangladesh inventory experts recently participated in USAID-organized focus group discussions to share practical knowledge and skills, including how to use the US EPA Template Workbook.

• 01/31/2018
• Joshua Forgotson

USAID’s Findings and Preliminary Lessons from Uganda, Ethiopia, and Peru looked at three countries facing challenges from climate change. In all three countries, climate change is disrupting communities’ long-held understandings of their environments.

• 01/30/2018
• Christine Chumbler

Motivated by more frequent droughts that have eroded their livelihoods and intensified food insecurity, competing groups of pastoralists in one area of Ethiopia are abandoning violence and working together to calm conflicts and adapt to changing conditions. 

• 01/26/2018
• Erin Martin

By working together to reduce fragility and vulnerability, could we not only better prepare for disaster, but also help prevent conflict? We have the policy tools to take an integrated approach to climate, conflict, and disaster—but we need the political will to use them.

• 01/25/2018
• Florian Krampe, Roberta Scassa

• 01/17/2018

Sea-level rise poses challenges for cities in both developing and developed countries. One city in the United States offers an example of how coastal cities are coping with this challenge. Their approach may be of interest and use to practitioners working in developing countries.

• 01/16/2018
• Christine Chumbler

For farmers in Indonesia, climate change is more than scientific models and emissions scenarios; it is a harsh reality reflected in the day-to-day struggle to sustain their livelihood. Farmers are intimately familiar with the traditional ebb and flow of the weather, and the increasing chasm between how things used to be and how things are today.

• 01/11/2018
• Climatelinks

Fortunately, there are proven ways to engage communities and bring them on board with renewable energy. A case in point is the USAID ProParque project in Honduras and its experience introducing small hydropower to highland communities.

• 01/11/2018
• Gwen Andersen, Mily Cortés-Posas

On Yap Island in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), four atoll communities—about 800 people from the outer islands who have migrated to the main island—have gained a reputation for growing good-quality vegetables.

• 01/04/2018
• Dr. Murukesan Krishnapillai

To update an old development adage, rather than teaching a person to fish, the USAID/Philippines Ecosystems Improved for Sustainable Fisheries (ECOFISH) project sought to teach fishing communities how much to fish, where to fish and how to monitor fish in order to manage their wild fish resources sustainably.  

• 01/04/2018
• Barbara Best, Rebecca Guieb

Women are playing a central role in protecting mangroves and building climate-resilient coastal communities, as projects in Vietnam and Indonesia are demonstrating.

• 12/19/2017
• Nayna Jhaveri, Nguyen Thu Ha