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The report highlights a critical 'data deficit' in the energy sector, where the lack of sex-disaggregated data reinforces male-oriented policymaking and hinders the achievement of SDG7. It identifies systemic barriers to women's participation in the energy workforce—where they represent only 32% of the renewable energy sector—and the disproportionate impact of energy poverty on women and girls. The document provides a framework for designing gender indicators, emphasizing the need for both supply-side (employment/leadership) and demand-side (consumer preferences/household decision-making) metrics. It concludes with best practices for national policymakers, statistical offices, and international organizations to strengthen data capacity, particularly in low-income countries.

The document explores how battery storage can enable eCooking in areas with weak, unreliable, or non-existent electricity grids. It specifically proposes a Battery Swapping Model (BSM) where users lease batteries from a central station, reducing upfront capital burdens and ensuring professional battery maintenance. The paper identifies a 'Goldilocks Zone' for this model—informal urban settlements, humanitarian settings, and mini-grid edges—where population density and proximity to stations make daily swaps practical. It concludes that while promising, the BSM requires targeted pilots to determine financial and operational viability.

Chad's updated NDC aims for a 19.3% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to a business-as-usual scenario, primarily through energy efficiency and reforestation. The plan identifies agriculture as the dominant emission source (95%) and emphasizes extreme vulnerability to droughts and floods. Implementation requires an estimated 6.7 billion USD for mitigation and between 5 and 14 billion USD for adaptation, with a heavy reliance on international financial support.

This report argues that transforming gender relations in sub-Saharan African agriculture is essential for improving agricultural productivity, food security, and overall human development. It posits a causal link between gender equality in households and communities and better agricultural outcomes, asserting that standard development interventions cannot fully succeed unless women and men are on equal footing.

The report examines the energy-agriculture nexus in Africa, focusing on five case study countries: Cameroon, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. It develops three primary scenarios—Reference, Moderate Improvement, and Accelerated Growth—to project energy needs for on-farm activities, crop processing, and transport. The analysis highlights that while high-input mechanized farming significantly increases commercial energy intensity, food security gains in some contexts, such as Sudan, can be achieved without proportional increases in energy consumption. The document also explores the role of agro-industries and the potential for energy efficiency improvements in irrigation and crop curing.

The document identifies critical gaps in current disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts, specifically the neglect of cultural and contextual factors in vulnerability assessments. It argues that DRR, climate change adaptation, and development are currently 'siloed' and must be integrated to avoid unsustainable patterns of exploitation and loss. The authors call for a shift from top-down, expert-driven governance to transformative, bottom-up approaches that incorporate local knowledge and non-economic assets. To achieve this, they propose using holistic, mixed-method research tools, such as Knowledge Elicitation Tools (KnETs), to better understand the tacit drivers of decision-making and organisational culture.

The report examines the relationship between water productivity, water flows, and ecosystem services, emphasizing that narrow agricultural efficiency often creates trade-offs with broader landscape health. It advocates for an integrated approach to water resource management that values regulating and supporting services alongside provisioning ones.

The report examines how gender inequalities in sub-Saharan Africa hinder agricultural productivity and proposes an 'empowerment pathway' focusing on agency, structure, and relations. It provides evidence that closing the gender gap in resource access could increase farm yields by 20-30%. Through case studies in countries like Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Uganda, the document illustrates successful strategies including gender-responsive budgeting, household-level gender analysis, and the engagement of traditional leaders to secure women's land rights and improve value chain participation. It also addresses the specific intersection of gender and 'climate-smart' agriculture, emphasizing that women's vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by existing structural inequalities.

The report analyzes how rigid gender norms, lack of capital, and limited asset ownership prevent women from benefiting from agricultural commercialization in Sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights that women often perform the bulk of the labor but lack control over the resulting income, which can lead to poor product quality and reduced household nutrition. The document provides a strategic framework for interventions, ranging from professionalizing traditional 'women's crops' to redistributive actions that challenge male-dominated chains. Case studies from Kenya (SHEP) and Zimbabwe (ZOPPA) demonstrate that combining gender awareness training with technical capacity building and organic certification can improve income parity and market access for women farmers.

The paper analyzes 20 years of independent forest monitoring (IFM) in the Congo Basin, noting that while IFM has led to the withdrawal of illegal forest titles and improved governance, its activity levels have declined since its early years. It suggests that the IFM model should be expanded to agricultural commodities and REDD+ projects, supported by institutionalized policy reform and long-term funding.

The document outlines five primary concerns raised by local and indigenous communities in Cameroon and the DRC regarding the implementation of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), emphasizing that a lack of such perspectives may hinder the development of effective measures in the Congo Basin.

The document analyzes the development of forest and land-use information systems (FLUIS) in Cameroon, Indonesia, and Peru, emphasizing the need for high-level government support, cross-sectoral institutional mapping, and sustainable national funding to maintain staff and infrastructure beyond external support. It highlights that integrating sub-national data requires standardized collection and the inclusion of regional governments in planning, while noting that a primary capacity gap is the lack of coordination between ministries regulating land-use drivers.

The GFI Guidance Manual establishes a framework for assessing forest governance by evaluating actors, rules, and practices against five principles of good governance: transparency, participation, accountability, coordination, and capacity. It provides a structured approach to designing assessments, collecting mixed-methods data, and analyzing results across six thematic areas: forest tenure, land use, forest management, forest revenues, cross-cutting institutions, and cross-cutting issues.

The WRI Results Framework establishes a structured system to plan and evaluate programmatic progress across three primary human systems: food, land & water; energy; and cities. It sets specific global targets for 2030 and WRI intervention targets for 2027, focusing on outcomes such as reducing agricultural land demand by 100 Mha, increasing the share of zero-carbon electricity by 9% in target geographies, and improving urban climate resilience. The framework integrates Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and utilizes a tiered approach of global, intervention, and country-specific targets, supported by impact indicators for people, nature, and climate.

The report describes the transition of Global Forest Watch from GFW 1.0, which relied on laborious manual data collection and paper maps in pilot countries, to GFW 2.0, a transformative online platform launched in 2014. Developed through a partnership between the World Resources Institute, Google, and the University of Maryland, GFW 2.0 utilizes satellite data and cloud computing to provide near real-time deforestation alerts. The platform is used by corporations like Nestlé and Unilever to clean supply chains, by indigenous communities to protect ancestral lands, and by civil society to fight illegal logging. Notably, the document highlights that communities in Peru using GFW have reduced deforestation rates by at least 58%.

The report attributes the 2022 West African floods to a combination of anthropogenic climate change, which significantly increased the likelihood and intensity of rainfall in the Lake Chad and Lower Niger basins, and systemic vulnerabilities including poor water management, rapid unplanned urbanization, and socioeconomic instability. In the Lake Chad region, climate change made the seasonal rainfall event approximately 80 times more likely and 20% more intense. In the Lower Niger basin, the 7-day maximum rainfall event became about twice as likely and 5% more intense. The human toll was exacerbated by the release of the Lagdo Dam in Cameroon and the proximity of settlements to floodplains.

The document details the diet, social structure, and species diversity of gorillas in central and eastern Africa. It highlights the role of gorillas as an "umbrella" species whose habitat protection supports broader biodiversity and climate change mitigation, particularly in the Congo Basin. The text also outlines threats such as Ebola, poaching, and habitat destruction, while noting that ecotourism provides financial incentives for forest preservation.

The 'Food is Local' fellowship by WWF International provides funding for master's and PhD students from 32 eligible countries to conduct interdisciplinary research on transforming food systems to be more sustainable, equitable, and climate-resilient. Eligible applicants must be citizens of the listed countries, have two years of conservation experience, and plan to start their studies by January 2024. Research proposals are encouraged to cover themes such as agroecological practices, gender equity, and the role of food systems in achieving Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).