Search Climate Insights Directory
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Énergie : Accès et autosuffisance
The report by Friends of the Earth International examines the global disparities in energy consumption, distinguishing between energy exclusion in the Global South and energy poverty in the Global North. It proposes 'energy sufficiency'—defined as using neither more nor less energy than is sufficient for a dignified life—as an alternative to energy efficiency, which can lead to the 'Jevons paradox' or 'rebound effect' where efficiency increases overall consumption. The document illustrates this through case studies: solar PV projects in Gaza to counter electricity shortages; community solar lighting in rural Cameroon to bypass centralized, polluting grids; and a community-owned mini-grid on the Isle of Eigg in Scotland that uses consumption caps to maintain sustainability.
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Document type: Report
Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction
The paper explores how learning within and across organizations can enhance disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community resilience. It identifies key facilitators of learning, such as high leadership commitment and skilled mediation, and barriers, including the exclusion of stakeholders and unclear project aims. The document details the EDUCEN project's application of social learning, social network analysis, and knowledge transfer to integrate cultural aspects into DRR. It emphasizes that resilience requires adaptive governance and the ability of communities to learn from past disasters to improve future risk reduction measures.
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Document type: Research paper
Beyond ecosystem services: a food security perspective
The authors argue that traditional ecosystem services (EServ) frameworks are insufficient for modelling food provision because they focus solely on flows from nature to humans, neglecting critical human-to-nature and human-to-human interactions. To address this, the paper suggests an agent-based modelling (ABM) approach combined with a 'social-ecological governance compass' to capture how individual behaviors—categorized by cooperation, competition, conformation, and differentiation—influence collective food security outcomes. Using a case study from the Zomba District of Malawi, the paper demonstrates that cooperative economic behavior and differentiated production patterns can optimize the flow of benefits from nature to humans through social networks, such as labor exchange and food banking, which are often overlooked in market-driven paradigms.
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Document type: Research paper
The Sendai Framework: A catalyst for the transformation of disaster risk reduction through adaptive governance?
The document argues that the Sendai Framework's emphasis on multi-level collaboration, learning, and innovation aligns with adaptive governance, which can help manage the complexity of social-ecological systems. While the Framework provides a window for transformative change, its implementation faces hurdles including high operational costs, power imbalances, and the lack of a dedicated funding mechanism.
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Document type: Briefing
Addressing the cultural gap between humanitarian assistance and local responses to risk through a place-based approach
The briefing argues that cultural differences between international disaster risk reduction (DRR) actors and local communities can increase social vulnerability. It highlights a clash between the 'expert'-driven, scientific culture of aid organizations and the culturally embedded, place-specific risk perceptions of local populations. To resolve this, the authors advocate for 'place-based research' that explores emotional attachments and social memories linked to specific biophysical locations, allowing for the co-creation of risk reduction strategies aligned with local sociocultural priorities.
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Document type: Briefing
Codex Planetarius
The author argues that current voluntary certification programs and fragmented national laws are insufficient to protect planetary health because the most significant environmental impacts are caused by the bottom 25% of producers. Drawing a parallel to the Codex Alimentarius, which standardized food safety for consumers, the proposed Codex Planetarius would create a mandatory 'umbrella' standard for environmental performance. This system would focus on 6-8 key impact areas—including biodiversity loss, GHG emissions, and soil health—to ensure the sustainable management of renewable resources. The document suggests that such a system could be integrated into global trade via WTO Art XX GATT Exemptions and outlines a four-phase implementation plan spanning approximately ten years.
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Document type: Research paper
New Research for Effective Action at Paris and Beyond
The report compiles research on enhancing global climate action, focusing on innovative financing mechanisms like microfinance and debt-for-climate swaps, the role of carbon pricing in driving innovation, and the necessity of robust accountability frameworks for the Paris Agreement. It also examines specific urban water resiliency in Patna, India, and proposes a Low-Emissions Technology Commitment within the UNFCCC to accelerate energy research. The proceedings emphasize the need for a multi-level approach to adaptation and the potential for 'climate clubs' to overcome multilateral deadlock.
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Document type: Report
Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer
The document outlines six attributes of resilience for watershed governance: inclusive participation, shared understanding, inclusion of ecosystem services, strong leadership, institutional flexibility, and decentralized systems. It emphasizes managing for change rather than against it, using tools like the Social-Ecological Inventory and historical profiling to build trust and adaptability in social-ecological systems.
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Document type: Guide
DEVELOPING A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOUTH‐SOUTH CO-OPERATION
The report, developed by the Network of Southern Think Tanks (NeST), addresses the lack of a common definition and reporting system for South-South co-operation (SSC). It distinguishes South-South development co-operation (SSDC) as a subset of SSC and argues that it is broader than the OECD-DAC's Official Development Assistance (ODA) definition. The document proposes a comprehensive set of indicators to assess the quality of partnerships across seven dimensions, including national ownership, horizontality, and transparency. It also explores methodological approaches for impact evaluation, suggesting a shift toward 'double-sided' results-based management that recognizes mutual benefits for both provider and recipient. Finally, it outlines a roadmap for NeST to establish a global statistical hub for SSC data in collaboration with UN agencies.
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Document type: Report
What Counts: Tools to Help Define and Understand Progress Towards the $100 Billion Climate Finance Commitment
The paper identifies five key variables—motivation, concessionality/source, causality, geographic origin, and recipient—that shape the debate over what constitutes climate finance. It uses concentric 'onion diagrams' to map these variables based on the level of political consensus among stakeholders, with the center representing the strongest consensus. The authors provide an integrated framework to help Parties transparently communicate their preferences and identify zones of agreement, while also highlighting critical accounting issues such as committed versus disbursed funds and nominal versus subsidy costs.
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Document type: Research paper
Ecosystems and human health: towards a conceptual framework for assessing the co-benefits of climate change adaptation
The document argues that climate change adaptation measures involving green and blue areas provide significant co-benefits for human health, which are often overlooked in policy design. It develops a conceptual framework based on five pathways: prevention of climate and pollution effects, improvement of ecosystem quality, social environment benefits, economic activity development, and interaction with microorganisms. The authors review existing literature using objective, self-reported, and mixed methodologies, finding a generally positive but inconsistent correlation between natural environments and health outcomes, with green areas being more extensively studied than blue areas.
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Document type: Research paper
Water-Energy-Food for Policymakers: What does it mean?
The document defines the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus as the combined demand for water, energy, and food, noting that traditional methods of meeting these needs are often unsustainable, leading to issues like climate change and groundwater depletion. It outlines IISD's strategy of using watershed-based management, ecological design, and stakeholder consultation to create practical solutions, specifically citing projects in Canada's Lake Winnipeg watershed and mining contexts in Suriname.
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Document type: Guide
Investigating ecology and poverty dimensions of biomass use and energy access: methodological issues
The document argues that traditional techno-economic approaches to energy access are insufficient and proposes an ecosystem services lens to better understand how biomass use affects human welfare and the environment. It details three primary research methodologies: demand-side surveys, supply and value chain analysis, and economic modeling of consumer choice, with a particular focus on the charcoal sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Document type: Briefing
Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in Indonesia: institutional challenges and opportunities for integration
The paper proposes a conceptual framework for integrating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) in Indonesia, arguing for institutional re-orientation, stronger local support to address vulnerability, and the utilization of non-governmental organisations for community-based initiatives.
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Document type: Research paper
Financing Pathways for Low Emissions and Climate Resilient Development
The document proposes "National Financing Pathways" as a framework for developing countries to scale investment for low-emission and climate-resilient development. It emphasizes the need to balance social, economic, and environmental objectives within a "national finance ecosystem" shaped by policy, institutional frameworks, and risk perceptions. The paper draws on discussions with representatives from Chile, Colombia, and Peru to identify issues and tools for developing these pathways.
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Document type: Research paper
Strategies for building resilience to hazards in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems: the role of public-private partnerships
The paper examines the multi-level nature of resilience in WASH systems—at regional, urban, and individual levels—to identify strategies for public-private partnerships. It argues that businesses must integrate ecosystem health into investment decisions to mitigate climate-related risks like floods and droughts. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for an institutional culture focused on greener urban environments and partnerships that support vulnerable populations through micro-finance and the inclusion of informal entrepreneurs.
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Document type: Research paper
What is climate finance?
The document outlines CPI's approach to defining climate finance, distinguishing between project-level costs and revenues and broader whole-economy expenditures. It defines climate finance as the sum of total investment costs and public framework expenditures, explicitly excluding revenue support to avoid double counting. The brief also identifies three primary entry points for public intervention to close 'viability gaps'—the difference between total project costs and generated revenues—which include increasing revenues, reducing project costs, and improving the overall investment climate through framework expenditures.
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Document type: Briefing
Southern Africa’s Dryland Forests, Climate Change and the Water–Energy– Food Security Nexus
The document examines the critical role of dryland forests in Southern Africa, highlighting their vulnerability to deforestation and climate change. It proposes a 'nexus approach' to overcome the marginalisation of the forestry sector by demonstrating its interdependencies with water, energy, and food security. The author argues that integrated landscape management and multi-sectoral policy coordination can identify win-win solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation, such as agroforestry and payment for watershed services.
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Document type: Research paper
How to scale out community-based adaptation to climate change
The document discusses the necessity of localised adaptation to climate change and the potential to 'scale out' community-based adaptation (CBA) solutions. It defines scaling out as providing "more quality benefits to more people over a wider geographical area, more equitably, more quickly, and more lastingly". Rather than focusing on high-level policy, the paper examines how local actors can pilot and showcase innovations until they are replicated. Based on CDKN's work in Bangladesh, Colombia, and eastern and southern Africa, the paper identifies four key elements common to successful scaling: networks and partnerships, documenting evidence and learning, adaptive capacity, and institutional channels and finance mechanisms.
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Document type: Research paper
Disasters, climate change and development: Reducing risk by tackling the drivers of vulnerability
The document argues that disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation have evolved separately despite significant overlaps. It highlights that while DRR focuses on near-term risks and emergency management, adaptation takes a longer-term view of adjusting to climatic shifts. The brief emphasizes that both are driven by exposure and vulnerability, which are often exacerbated by poor development planning. It calls for a transformative approach that prioritizes vulnerability reduction over simple risk management, integrating human rights and sustainable development to prevent the creation of new risks.
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Document type: Briefing