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The document warns that African oil and gas producing countries risk committing public funds to stranded assets by basing investment decisions on current price trends rather than energy transition scenarios. It highlights the vulnerability of National Oil Companies (NOCs) and the potential for revenue overestimation, specifically citing risks in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Senegal. The author advocates for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) to mandate the disclosure of project viability data and for governments to diversify their economies.

The report examines the intersection of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), noting that while BRI infrastructure investments can support AfCFTA goals, a lack of coordinated African strategy poses risks. It highlights China's incentive to access the AfCFTA's massive consumer market while warning that cheap Chinese imports could undermine the free trade area's objectives.

The paper analyzes China's public diplomacy in Africa, noting a transition from risk-averse protocols to the use of social media and 'humanized' diplomats. While the pandemic provided opportunities for 'vaccine diplomacy' and PPE donations, the mass eviction of African migrants in Guangzhou in 2020 triggered a significant backlash. The authors argue that despite experimenting with digital tools, China retreated to traditional, elite-focused diplomatic methods to mitigate the Guangzhou crisis, revealing a persistent preference for high-level engagement over genuine dialogue with African publics.

The analysis finds a growing trend of countries incorporating fossil fuel production into their national climate communications, with some establishing pathways for managed decline. However, a significant number of countries still plan for continued or expanded production, and many fail to address the equity and economic diversification needs of a just transition.

The report examines the crisis of missing persons in Africa, documenting nearly 44,000 cases through the ICRC as of 2020. It identifies armed conflict, other situations of violence, and migration as primary drivers, noting that men and children are disproportionately affected. Families face severe psychosocial trauma, economic hardship, and legal hurdles due to a lack of domestic frameworks for declaring absence. The document advocates for the establishment of national information bureaus, improved medico-legal capacity for body identification, and the integration of missing persons into transitional justice processes.

The authors contend that environmental degradation and climate change are fundamental drivers of food insecurity and conflict. They highlight how resource competition in regions like the Sahel and Yemen fuels violence and extremism, while pointing to natural farming successes in India as a model for resilience. The document recommends that international security institutions acknowledge climate security risks to effectively address stability and displacement.

The report argues that the Central African Republic remains trapped in a cycle of violence despite numerous peace agreements, most recently the 2019 Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation. It finds that the 2019 agreement is untenable because key provisions, such as the creation of mixed special security units (MSSUs) and an inclusive government, have failed to deter armed groups from continuing violence and controlling territory. The author highlights a 'war economy' where armed groups and some government officials benefit from instability and the illicit exploitation of resources. Furthermore, the report suggests that heavy reliance on international humanitarian aid has inadvertently reduced state responsibility and created local resentment. It recommends a comprehensive plan involving the African Union, ECCAS, and the UN that focuses on rebuilding the economic fabric, securing borders through regional cooperation with Chad, Sudan, and South Sudan, and establishing time-bound objectives for self-reliance.

The report finds that finance for energy access in high-impact countries (HICs) remains critically insufficient. In 2019, tracked electricity finance in HICs fell to USD 32 billion, with residential access funding at less than one-third of the required annual investment. Clean cooking investment has stagnated around USD 130 million annually, far below the USD 4.5 billion needed. While private investment in clean cooking reached a peak of USD 56 million in 2019, multilateral DFI support plummeted. The report emphasizes the need for climate-resilient infrastructure, as seen in Mozambique, and highlights divergent technological paths in Ghana (LPG) and Vietnam (biogas).

The 2021 Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index reveals a slowing pace of global improvement and widening disparities in women's status. While developed countries, particularly Nordic nations, lead the index, fragile states and regions like South Asia perform poorly. The report highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities, particularly through job losses in female-dominated sectors and increased risks of intimate partner violence. Additionally, new indices for forcibly displaced women and subnational data for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States demonstrate that national averages often conceal severe internal disparities and the compounding disadvantages of displacement.

The report argues that disarmament is often an elite bargain where symbolic gestures are more critical for peace than the technical collection of all weapons. It highlights that exclusionary processes often marginalize women and other armed groups, and that external actors can either facilitate peace or hinder it by imposing generic templates that ignore local contexts.

The report analyzes Sweden's 2017–2018 term on the UN Security Council, examining how a small state can influence the body's outcomes regarding Women, Peace and Security (WPS). It details Sweden's strategic approach—rooted in its feminist foreign policy—to move WPS from a thematic 'add-on' to 'core Council business' by integrating actionable language into regular resolutions, particularly those concerning peacekeeping and political mission mandates. The authors provide a framework for assessing the impact of elected members (E10) through criteria of frequency, clarity, and priority of resolution language, while outlining the tactical maneuvering required to navigate P5 power dynamics and UNSC working methods.

Cooling access gaps for the rural and urban poor grew across all analyzed regions in 2021. In Africa, 776 million people across 31 high-impact countries face cooling challenges, with 215 million urban poor at highest risk. In Asia and the Middle East, the population at highest risk rose to 645 million in 2021, with significant rural poor increases in India and Bangladesh. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of people at highest risk in six high-impact countries reached 48.8 million, with the majority being the urban poor.

The report finds that energy finance in high-impact countries (HICs) is critically insufficient to meet SDG7 targets. In 2019, tracked electricity finance in HICs fell to USD 32 billion, with residential access funding at only one-third of the required annual investment. Clean cooking investment has stagnated around USD 130 million annually, far below the USD 4.5 billion needed. While there is a positive shift away from fossil fuel electricity generation and an increase in private finance for clean cooking, significant gaps remain, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report advocates for increased climate resilience in infrastructure, the scaling of decentralized energy solutions, and the integration of clean cooking into national climate policies and NDCs.

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), in collaboration with the UNDP and GEF, is seeking Expressions of Interest from organizations managing innovative finance mechanisms in fragile and conflict-prone regions. The initiative aims to support private sector solutions that address the 'triple threat' of COVID-19, climate change-induced extreme weather, and geopolitical instability. Selected organizations will receive grants, technical assistance from a multidisciplinary mentoring facility, and networking opportunities to improve the scale and effectiveness of their funds. Eligible mechanisms must be based in specific Least Developed Countries (LDCs), demonstrate a sustainable revenue model, and focus on the intersection of climate adaptation, food and water security, and disaster risk reduction.

The report examines the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), adopted in December 2018. It argues that UNDROP fills a gap in international human rights law by recognizing peasants and other rural workers as collective rights holders, rather than just a sum of individuals. The document details how the Declaration protects collective rights to land, food sovereignty, seeds, water, and a healthy environment, while debunking myths that collective rights oppose individual rights or are exclusive to Indigenous Peoples. It provides strategies for applying the Declaration at national, regional, and international levels to hold states and transnational corporations accountable.

The document analyzes the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) as a tool to shift human rights frameworks from purely individualistic perspectives to the recognition of collective rights. It details how UNDROP protects the rights of peasants, indigenous peoples, and nomadic communities to food sovereignty, land, seeds, and a healthy environment. The report highlights the role of collective rights in supporting agroecology and community forest management, while debunking myths that collective rights oppose individual rights or are exclusive to indigenous peoples. It provides examples of national and regional applications and advocates for a binding UN treaty on transnational corporations to ensure corporate accountability for human rights violations in rural areas.

The report examines how land conflict in South Sudan is rooted in historical grievances and exacerbated by civil wars, leading to widespread land grabbing by military and political elites. It highlights the failure of the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) to explicitly address land within its transitional justice framework. Based on citizen interviews, the report finds a strong preference for restitution over compensation and communal reparations over individual ones. It recommends that the Compensation and Reparations Authority (CRA) be used to address land-related human rights violations and that the government expedite the adoption of a national land policy to resolve conflicting statutory and customary tenure systems.

The report evaluates the African Union's (AU) limited capacity to intervene in crises due to principles of national sovereignty and subsidiarity. It details the unraveling political alliance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the conceptual and operational failures of the 'Silencing the Guns in Africa 2020' initiative, and identifies high-risk elections and conflicts in countries such as South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia for 2021. Additionally, it features an interview on the necessity of a culturally contextualized African mediation doctrine based on the AU's experience in Sudan.

The briefing examines the critical role of cold chains in COVID-19 vaccine distribution, highlighting the gap between current infrastructure and the requirements of new vaccine candidates, some of which need ultra-low temperatures (-70C to -80C). It identifies significant barriers in low- and middle-income countries, including unreliable energy access, outdated equipment, and high upfront costs. The report argues that achieving herd immunity requires a massive expansion of sustainable, energy-efficient cold chains and proposes strategies such as 'Cooling as a Service' (CaaS), public-private partnerships like Project Last Mile, and a 'last mile' planning approach to ensure equitable access.

The document argues that while a 'grand theory' of migration does not exist, researchers can use 'theoretical triangulation' to formulate testable propositions. It presents ten such propositions covering the roles of pre-existing connections, social networks, involuntary immobility, resource constraints, environmental stress, violent conflict, economic development, development aid, and the effectiveness and unintended consequences of migration policies.