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The Lab has launched six financial instruments targeting blue carbon, sustainable agriculture, sustainable cities, and energy access. These instruments, which follow a seven-month design and stress-testing period, aim to mobilize significant investment for sustainable development. Key projects include mangrove restoration in the Philippines, blockchain-based crop insurance in Kenya, and solar securitization in Rwanda.

The paper argues that ignoring gender and power inequalities in climate change adaptation is maladaptive and leads to further exclusion. It advocates for 'gender-transformative adaptation'—which seeks to change the fundamental attributes of a system and address the root causes of vulnerability—across the natural environment, food security, sustainable cities, infrastructure, industry, and finance. The authors highlight how intersecting inequalities (income, ethnicity, age, etc.) compound vulnerability and recommend rigorous, participatory gender analyses to inform policy and project design. Key findings include the risk of 'elite capture' in the green economy and the critical need for women's land and resource rights to enable nature-based solutions.

The paper argues that ignoring gender and power inequalities in climate adaptation is maladaptive and recommends transforming social structures to ensure equitable resilience. It analyzes six key systems—natural environment, food security, sustainable cities, infrastructure, industry, and finance—demonstrating how patriarchal norms and intersecting inequalities (such as class, ethnicity, and age) disproportionately burden women and marginalized groups. The authors advocate for rigorous gender analyses, the redistribution of care work, and the inclusion of diverse voices in decision-making to move beyond tokenistic gender mainstreaming toward systemic, gender-transformative change.

The GCF's Private Sector Facility (PSF) aims to green the financial systems of developing countries by addressing capacity, market, and policy barriers. The GCF utilizes three primary pillars: providing concessional financing and project preparation grants, implementing policy-level interventions through its Readiness Programme, and conducting outreach through partnerships with global networks. The document highlights the critical role of central banks as regulators and the importance of local financial institutions (LFIs) in reaching micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and households. Case studies from Mongolia, Ghana, and West Africa demonstrate the use of on-lending models and risk-sharing instruments to scale up renewable energy and climate-resilient agriculture.

The Malekula Water Supply Project aims to transition water infrastructure on Malekula Island from vulnerable decentralised systems to climate-resilient centralised systems. The project addresses freshwater scarcity caused by sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, and erratic rainfall. Key interventions include relocating boreholes inland to avoid salinity, installing new extraction and treatment systems from the Malua and Losinwei rivers, and implementing ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) through the restoration of indigenous forests to improve groundwater recharge and reduce erosion. The project also establishes emergency water supply protocols and consumption-based tariffs to ensure long-term operational sustainability.

The document advocates for Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) as a critical mechanism to overcome the limitations of siloed sectoral approaches to climate change adaptation. It defines ILM as a process where diverse stakeholders collaborate to manage natural resources sustainably at a local scale, typically ranging from 100 to 10,000 km2. The authors identify five key features of effective ILM: multi-stakeholder institutions, structured cross-sector planning, synergistic interventions, aligned public policies, and coordinated investment portfolios. Using the Imarisha Naivasha initiative in Kenya as a case study, the paper demonstrates how ILM can resolve resource conflicts and build resilience. It concludes with recommendations for the Global Commission on Adaptation to foster ILM platforms, improve inter-agency planning, mobilize private sector investment, and build research systems for climate-resilient landscapes.

The document examines the challenges of measuring climate change adaptation, noting that most existing frameworks are designed for project-level monitoring rather than national or global assessment. It argues against a 'one-size-fits-all' metric, suggesting instead that metrics be tailored to specific purposes—such as identifying needs, tracking implementation, or assessing effectiveness. The paper highlights evolving practices in agriculture, urban planning (using the City of Melbourne as a case study), and multilateral development bank (MDB) financing, while recommending the integration of qualitative data, new technologies like earth observation, and alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to improve the comparability and transparency of adaptation tracking.

The document is a guide for creating enabling legal frameworks for community forestry, emphasizing iterative and participatory reform processes. It provides a comprehensive set of questionnaires across ten thematic areas—including land tenure, allocation, governance, and market access—to ensure that laws protect the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples while promoting sustainable forest management.

The report evaluates ten Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) Round 1 projects, which supported over 5 million people. Key findings highlight the effectiveness of 'layering' interventions, participatory design, and close government partnerships in increasing resilience. Successes include the deployment of early warning systems reaching 1.2 million people in Uganda, the empowerment of urban slum women in South Asia, and the implementation of road water harvesting benefiting 3 million people in Ethiopia. The synthesis emphasizes that combining traditional tools like microcredit with innovative digital technology and inclusive social strategies creates sustainable, transformational change.

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) Water Window Challenge supported over 500,000 people across eight countries through 12 projects focused on flood resilience. The synthesis identifies that success was driven by 'layering' interventions—combining livelihood support, early warning systems (EWS), and infrastructure—and by deep stakeholder engagement. Key achievements include the establishment of 347 women-led community-based organizations in Sri Lanka, the support of 265,000 individuals in Indonesia through transboundary coordination, and the deployment of EWS reaching over 84,000 households in the India-Nepal border region. The report emphasizes that flexible, adaptive management and strong partnerships are essential for innovating and scaling resilience efforts in volatile climatic contexts.

The report identifies five key intervention areas for building resilience: nature-based solutions, empowering marginalized groups, information and technology, inclusive financial services, and low-cost infrastructure. It argues that effective resilience programming must be systemic by design, utilize layered and linked interventions, create agile networks, promote equity and inclusion, and prioritize iterative learning and scaling. Evidence from GRP's USAID and Z Zurich Foundation challenges, as well as 42 partner programs, demonstrates that these approaches can protect development gains and improve well-being in the face of climate and economic shocks.

The document analyzes 44 resilience programs to determine which design elements contribute to success in helping vulnerable populations persist, adapt, and transform in the face of shocks. Key findings highlight the importance of community-led vulnerability assessments, the role of savings as a critical resilience buffer, and the necessity of integrating climate risk interventions into local governance and market systems.

The document examines how 'migration' and 'development' are defined and measured in quantitative research, highlighting a gap in evidence regarding migration aspirations, failed attempts, and involuntary immobility. It discusses the challenges of establishing causal links due to endogeneity—specifically reverse causality, self-selection, and omitted variables—and evaluates experimental and non-experimental methods to address these biases. The paper advocates for a holistic, multi-dimensional approach to development that moves beyond economic metrics to include social, institutional, and environmental outcomes.

The document assesses the multifaceted threats climate change poses to global food security, highlighting that while some high-latitude regions may see productivity gains, the global South—especially sub-Saharan Africa—faces severe risks of yield losses and increased hunger. It argues for a systemic approach to adaptation, moving beyond autonomous adjustments to planned strategies. Key priorities include increasing public investment in agricultural research, adopting Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), expanding irrigation, and improving the resilience of food value chains. The authors emphasize that adaptation must be balanced with greenhouse gas mitigation and social equity, particularly regarding gender and youth in agriculture.

The paper examines how social protection instruments—specifically cash transfers and public works programs—can be leveraged to build climate resilience. It identifies a substantial overlap between social protection and climate adaptation, noting that both target the most vulnerable. The authors propose three strategic shifts: enhancing the effectiveness of existing systems, integrating climate risk management (such as forecast-based early action), and layering social protection with other risk management tools like insurance. The document highlights that while social protection strongly supports absorptive and adaptive resilience, more work is needed to achieve transformative resilience.

The Republic of Congo is revising its forest legislation to include community forestry for the first time. ClientEarth identifies five priority areas for the new legal framework: clear land and forest tenure rights, accessible allocation processes, principles for community governance, simple management rules, and equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms. The briefing emphasizes that current proposals lack precision in these areas and calls for an inclusive, participatory drafting process involving local communities and indigenous populations to avoid implementation challenges and elite capture.

The report advocates for the integration of marine and coastal ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) into national climate policies and strategies in Southern Africa. It defines EbA as the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services to help people adapt to climate change, highlighting the value of mangroves, coral reefs, and seagrasses. The document identifies significant barriers to scaling EbA, including fragmented institutional governance, lack of quantitative cost-benefit data, and insufficient financing. It proposes innovative funding mechanisms like blue carbon projects and environmental impact bonds, and emphasizes the necessity of community-led partnerships and gender-inclusive approaches to ensure sustainable implementation.

The paper argues that while youth are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change, they possess significant potential to drive adaptation efforts if shifted from a narrative of passive victimhood to one of active empowerment. It identifies institutional barriers such as tokenism and lack of platforms, as well as capacity challenges including limited funding and gaps in technical knowledge. The authors advocate for institutionalizing meaningful youth engagement, integrating climate education into national curricula, and creating dedicated financial mechanisms for youth-led adaptation projects.

The document examines the synergies and challenges of aligning the NAP and NDC processes under the Paris Agreement. It argues that because the NDC provides high-level direction and the NAP elaborates implementation strategies, they are complementary tools. Based on dialogues with 16 countries and workshops in Grenada and Peru, the brief identifies that most countries currently have informal alignment and suggests using the 2020 NDC update cycle to integrate NAP results, improve data quality, and enhance adaptation goals.

The document provides a comparative overview of National Adaptation Plan (NAP) processes in multiple countries, detailing their specific strategic approaches, priority sectors, and implementation milestones. It emphasizes the integration of climate adaptation into national development planning, the importance of cross-sectoral coordination, and the mobilization of climate finance to build resilience against diverse hazards such as sea-level rise, droughts, and extreme weather events.