The ‘Global Landscape Forum – the Investment Case’ convened in London earlier this month with the aim of mitigating climate change and reducing poverty through investments in landscape restoration. Events like this one are desperately needed to ensure private-sector involvement in conservation efforts: a 2014-report found that $200-300 billion of investment per year is needed to […]
Earth is in a land degradation crisis. If we were to take the roughly one-third of the world’s land that has been degraded from its natural state and combine it into a single entity, these “Federated States of Degradia” would have a landmass bigger than Russia and a population of more than 3 billion, largely […]
Man-made climate change and large-scale alteration of the landscape are affecting the planet and the ecosystem services upon which humans depend. These alterations include loss of forests that were once large carbon sinks, loss of pollination services provided by bees, loss of ecosystem resilience in the face of natural disasters, and many others. While ecologists […]
Just as the world gets to grips with the urgency of limiting global warming to beneath 2°C, the official UN body charged with climate science (the IPCC) has been charged with understanding potential impacts if temperatures rise 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and how we might limit emissions to stay beneath this threshold. For those familiar […]
Climate change is one of the principal threats to quality – and equality – of life on our planet. Beyond environmental problems, climate change threatens food security, water availability, health, housing and self-determination. In essence, it confronts our basic liberties and pursuit of happiness. But the burden of climate change impacts is not distributed equally. […]
In 2015, more than 500 million hectares of forests were held by indigenous peoples. Despite the increase in forest area designated for and owned by indigenous peoples in recent decades, governments still administer 60 percent of these forest areas while firms and private individuals administer 9 percent. Pressure exerted by indigenous peoples over the past […]
Rising temperatures and more extreme, unpredictable climate events are making sustainable livelihoods tough for many people living in semi-arid regions of the world. To adapt, local communities, and especially farmers, use different strategies and responses. Research in India and Africa shows that achieving sustained and equitable adaptation requires a number of things. It is critical […]
There is a lot of buzz in the global development community about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—the pledges to cut poverty, hunger, and malnutrition while protecting the planet—signed by 193 countries. This commitment will guide global action over the next 15 years, promising to leave no one behind. But we already risk overlooking one important […]
We are living in the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history. The G20 nations, when they met in Australia in 2014, argued for between US$60 trillion and US$70 trillion in new infrastructure investments by 2030, which would more than double the global total value of infrastructure. Some of the key players in […]
This is Morocco’s Noor 1 concentrated solar power plant, the first phase of what will eventually be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. It is an impressive sight—visible even from space–and it holds the promise of supplying over 500 megawatts of power to over a million Moroccans by 2018. It also embodies […]
Imagine going through your day without ready access to clean water for drinking, cooking, washing or bathing. Around the world, 663 million people face that challenge every day. They get their water from sources that are considered unsafe because they are vulnerable to contamination, such as rivers, streams, ponds and unprotected wells. And the task […]
Readers of this blog site will know that open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed – it’s legally open and technically open. Readers of this blog may not know that the $8.3 billion Climate Investment Funds (CIF), are providing scaled-up financing through the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to initiate transformational […]
