Blog

Climate impacts social and economic development across sectors, in numerous ways. Each sector also has unique opportunities to contribute to climate solutions. USAID integrates climate change in development programming across a variety of technical fields.

• 06/18/2020
• Isabela Barriga

Do you have great photos of climate and development? Do you want to promote your work on Climatelinks? Now is your chance! Submit your photos so we can share your work or your organization’s work with our global community of climate practitioners. Our 2020 Photo Contest theme is Healthy Forests for a Healthy Future.

• 06/17/2020
• Climatelinks

Less than half of Nigeria’s 186 million people have access to electricity. But in the rural village of Gbamu Gbamu, newly installed utility poles and wires act as markers of a brighter future, powered by a new solar minigrid. The grid, an effort of local developers Rubitec Solar and Winrock’s USAID-funded Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Project (REEEP), is empowering citizens and their enterprises, providing them with a better quality of life and more stable sources of income.

• 06/17/2020
• Winrock International

How can programs encourage and enable local commercial banks to lend to companies supplying solar home systems for off-grid customers? Power Africa supported the USAID-funded Climate Economic Analysis for Development, Investment, and Resilience (CEADIR) Activity’s training and technical assistance on this topic. In the process,

• 06/11/2020
• Power Africa

An irrigation system with solar photovoltaic energy at the Ramon Rodriguez farm, in Dominican Republic, provides resilience to drought using renewable energy. This system was installed in May 2017 under the USAID Climate Resilience and Index Insurance Program for Small Farmers in the Dominican Republic, executed by the REDDOM Foundation.

• 06/10/2020
• Climatelinks

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

Improving access to and use of timely, accurate, and actionable weather and climate information is essential to building resilience to climate change and strengthening livelihoods across Africa. Collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors can foster innovative, sustainable, and cost-effective approaches to weather and climate services systems.

• 06/04/2020
• Ali Blumenstock

In many developing countries, the companies that build, supply, and sell clean energy solutions have difficulty obtaining bank loans or other financing to expand their businesses or reach new markets. This was the case in Rwanda until Power Africa, through USAID, at the demand from financial institutions and providers of solar PV solutions, took action to educate, connect, and support commercial lending programs for off-grid electricity.

• 06/01/2020
• Power Africa

• 05/27/2020
• John Fay, Admore Chiumia, Ramzy Kanaan

Yao Ahou, a cocoa farmer in Côte d’Ivoire, is well aware of the challenge she faces in farming for the core ingredient for the world’s chocolate. “For us cocoa farmers, our problem is climate change. When we expect the rains, it is the sun that comes up, and when the sun is expected, it is the rains that come.

• 05/26/2020
• Ethan Budiansky

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

Empowering the private sector to drive economic growth can be a powerful force for strengthening communities and accelerating self-reliance. Private Sector Engagement (PSE) is a strategic approach to international development through which USAID consults, strategizes, aligns, and collaborates with the private sector for greater scale, sustainability, and effectiveness of development or humanitarian outcomes.

• 05/14/2020
• Isabela Barriga, Eric Hyman

The Amazon region is home to 1.6 million Indigenous Peoples, all of whom depend on the region’s forest and water resources for their material and cultural survival. Studies have shown that deforestation rates are much lower in places where Amazonian Indigenous Peoples have strong land tenure rights, making Indigenous Peoples important allies in biodiversity conservation.

• 05/12/2020
• USAID Biodiversity Integration Case Studies

This common sighting in the rivers of the Peruvian Amazon portrays a "buoyer," a person whose job consists of untying timber that has floated to the banks of the river. The timber is on a downstream journey that takes over 24 hours. Nearly 40% of the Amazonian population in Peru relies economically on the timber value chain, including over 250,000 families, mostly of indigenous descent.

• 05/08/2020
• Climatelinks