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The document reports that human-induced warming of 1.3°C contributed to record-breaking temperatures, floods, and droughts in 2024, resulting in thousands of deaths and millions of displacements. It highlights that climate change added an average of 41 dangerous heat days globally and often overrode natural phenomena like El Niño. The report calls for a rapid transition from fossil fuels, improved early warning systems, real-time heat death reporting, and increased finance for developing countries to support adaptation.

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) launched its 2024-2029 Strategy and secured a four-year agreement with Sida to drive transformative change and locally-led innovation. Key 2024 activities include the expansion of the Resilience Hub to Climate Week NYC and London Climate Action Week, the growth of the PREPARE initiative with 39 participating companies, and the creation of the Resilient Planet Initiative (RPI) to democratise climate and adaptation data. Regional efforts include the Hindu Kush Himalaya Innovation Challenge for Entrepreneurs (HKH-ICE), the Resilient Agricultural Innovations for Nature (RAIN) Challenge in East Africa, and the Southern African Resilience Academy (SARA).

The report argues that ecological disruption is an underappreciated security threat and advocates for the integration of strategic foresight tools—such as horizon scanning, futures wheels, and scenario planning—into national security architecture. It identifies land/sea-use change and global atmospheric/oceanic warming as the primary drivers of ecological instability. Through four plausible mid-century scenarios, the document illustrates how these drivers can lead to systemic collapses, such as Amazon dieback or the failure of the Lake Victoria Basin, resulting in famine, pandemics, and geopolitical conflict. The author recommends that security stakeholders shift their risk calculus to include ecological decline and prioritize locally-led, indigenous stewardship in resource management.

The study finds that WACC in Africa's power sector remains high compared to global benchmarks, driven primarily by a cost of equity that is on average double the cost of debt. While WACC is projected to decrease from 18% to 13% by 2070, significant regional disparities persist, with Eastern Africa facing the highest costs and Northern Africa the lowest. The authors argue that using uniform cost of capital assumptions leads to underestimation bias in energy costs and misguides policy, particularly for capital-intensive clean energy projects.

The methodology for the Landscape of Climate Finance in Africa 2024 describes the framework used to identify and categorize climate finance flows. It employs a taxonomy to distinguish between mitigation, adaptation, and dual-benefits finance across sectors such as energy, transport, and agriculture. The approach relies on a mix of public and proprietary data from sources like the OECD, BNEF, and the World Bank, while acknowledging significant gaps in domestic public expenditure tracking and private sector reporting. The document also details the classification of African countries by subregion and income status.

The Sustana Cooling India Fund is a USD 100 million blended capital equity fund designed to support early-growth companies in India's cooling sector. By utilizing a first-loss cushion and combining senior and subordinated equity, the fund aims to de-risk investments in energy-efficient space cooling and cold supply chains. The instrument targets the 'missing middle' of funding (pre-Series A/B stages) to drive both climate mitigation and adaptation, with a projected return of 18.04% in USD terms for limited partners.

The report assesses the avocado value chain in East Africa, emphasizing the transition toward sustainable practices to support economic growth and rural development. It identifies that sustainability can protect the environment, improve smallholder farmer livelihoods, and facilitate entry into global markets. To overcome barriers to this transition, the document suggests increasing access to affordable finance, providing training in climate-smart farming, and creating market-focused policies.

The report analyzes the East African avocado value chain, highlighting that while the sector drives economic growth, it faces significant hurdles in quality control, infrastructure, and climate resilience. It emphasizes the necessity of transitioning to sustainable, climate-smart agricultural practices to maintain access to the EU market. Key opportunities for upgrading include improving cold chain infrastructure, enhancing access to finance for smallholders, and developing value-added bioproducts from waste.

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) reports significant progress between 2020 and 2023 in scaling resilience innovations, democratizing knowledge, and influencing global policy. Key achievements include the incubation of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), the growth of the Resilience Evidence Coalition to over 1,700 members, and the establishment of the Resilience Hub at COP26, COP27, and COP28. GRP focused on amplifying Global South voices through initiatives like the South to South Resilience Academies and the Locally Led Adaptation principles. The report highlights the mobilization of private sector finance through the PREPARE Call to Action and the implementation of innovation challenges such as RAIN in East Africa. These efforts are designed to transition GRP toward its 2024-2029 strategy, focusing on transforming food and financial systems and embedding resilience in the private sector.

The document highlights the severe economic and health costs of black carbon, noting that in China, short-term exposure in 2017 cost over US$7.5 billion and long-term exposure over US$53 billion. It asserts that reducing black carbon is a "triple win" that would protect glaciers, save millions of lives—including over 400,000 annually in India and nearly half a million in Sub-Saharan Africa—and improve gender equality by reducing the US$800 billion annual loss in women's productivity caused by unclean cooking fuels. Despite these benefits, the author notes that only 12 countries included black carbon targets in their first Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and warns that transportation-related emissions in Africa could double by 2040.

The document outlines how gender-responsive approaches—identifying barriers for women and promoting their leadership—enhance the efficiency of climate-smart technologies in agriculture and aquaculture. Drawing on the GLOW programme (2021–2024), it provides evidence from Africa and Central America showing that empowering women leads to higher yields, better market access, and increased attractiveness for impact investors.

The report argues that climate resilience requires innovation in complex systems, which inherently involves failure. However, a prevailing culture of failure-aversion—driven by rigid funding structures, short-term metrics, and power imbalances—stifles this innovation. The authors propose a multi-dimensional model to shift responses to failure from limiting to constructive across individual, operational, and organisational levels.

The Resilient Agriculture Innovations for Nature (RAIN) challenge, a partnership between the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and Shockwave Foundation, invites proposals for nature-positive agricultural innovations in East Africa. The program aims to transition seed-level ideas into sustainable, funding-ready businesses through a structured process of mentoring, leadership training, and investment brokering. Eligible applicants include not-for-profit organizations, start-ups, and academia from Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Winners receive tailored support, including up to 24 hours of mentoring over three months, access to a Leadership Academy, and potential next-stage funding for implementation and scaling over 12 months.

The Resilient Agriculture Innovations for Nature (RAIN) challenge, a partnership between the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and Munich Re Foundation, seeks innovative agricultural solutions in East Africa. The program targets not-for-profit organizations, including NGOs and academia, to develop scalable, nature-positive initiatives that build resilience for vulnerable populations and protect biodiversity. Selected winners will receive tailored mentoring, leadership training through a Leadership Academy, communications support, and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) assistance. Successful projects that graduate from the program and meet specific criteria will receive next-stage funding for implementation and scaling over a 12-month period. Applications are evaluated based on innovativeness, potential for impact, equity, scalability, viability, team composition, and risk.

The document advocates for a guaranteed universal basic income (UBIG) in South Africa, defining it as a regular state cash transfer provided as a right to all adults. It argues that UBIG addresses structural gender inequalities by providing women with financial independence, recognizing unpaid care work, and reducing intimate partner violence. Additionally, it asserts that UBIG enhances social cohesion by reducing crime and increasing civic participation, provided the system is universal and unconditional to avoid social stigma.

The ARCAFIM GESI Action Strategy establishes a framework to ensure that climate adaptation finance reaches vulnerable groups, specifically women, youth, and indigenous communities in East Africa. The program intends to mobilize US$ 270 million in climate change adaptation (CCA) investments and US$ 30 million in technical assistance (TA). It focuses on mainstreaming gender and climate lenses into the investment processes of the Equity Bank Group (EBG) and its Tier 2 Financial Intermediaries (FIs) through the use of a Gender-Smart Climate Financing Toolkit and alignment with international standards like the 2X Collaborative’s 2X Green toolkit and the Women Empowerment Principles.

The document argues that reporting on extreme weather is incomplete without explaining the climate connection. It provides specific phrasing for journalists to describe how warming temperatures 'supercharge' weather patterns and offers examples of this application across various phenomena, including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, sea level rise, winter weather, hurricanes, and wildfires. It also recommends specific attribution tools like the Climate Shift Index and World Weather Attribution to provide scientific grounding for these claims.

The report examines the role of voluntary sustainability standards (VSSs) in South-South trade, noting that trade between developing countries grew from USD 600 billion in 1995 to USD 5.3 trillion in 2021. It highlights five examples of VSS integration in the Global South, including organic certification agreements between Chile and Brazil and regional standards in East Africa and the Pacific. The report concludes that integrating VSSs into trade policy can lower compliance costs, reduce trade barriers for smallholders and SMEs, and increase demand for sustainable products.

Climate Resilient Landscape Finance (CRLF) is an innovative umbrella facility combining microfinance, private debt, and technical assistance to address the lack of bankability for sustainable land use in African conservation areas. The instrument aims to mobilize USD 12 million in capital to support local landowners and landscape management companies, leveraging international carbon and biodiversity credit markets to create self-sustaining conservation economies. A pilot phase will begin in the Northern Maasai Mara, Kenya, with plans to expand across Eastern and Southern Africa.

The document argues that Africa's vulnerability to climate change is underestimated because transboundary and cascading risks—where impacts in one country affect another via trade, finance, and shared ecosystems—are often overlooked. It suggests that National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) should be used to identify these external risks and the potential for domestic adaptation to create vulnerabilities elsewhere. The brief calls for increased international cooperation and the integration of climate risk into security, trade, and development policies to prevent adaptation efforts from creating 'winners and losers' across the continent.