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1,008 documents from Climate and Development Knowledge Network
Peri-urban ecosystems: The potential for a planned approach in India
The document argues that peri-urban ecosystems in India are critical for the resilience of both urban and peri-urban populations but are frequently neglected due to ambiguous administrative boundaries and rapid urbanisation. It highlights the essential services these areas provide, such as flood control, food security, and microclimate regulation, while warning that unplanned infrastructure leads to environmental degradation. The brief recommends integrated, flexible planning at the district level, the revival of District and Metropolitan Planning Committees, and the adoption of participatory, community-led governance to balance development with ecological preservation.
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Document type: Policy brief
Accelerating adaptation action in Africa
This research paper by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) identifies key strategies to accelerate climate change adaptation across Africa. Based on interviews with African scientists and practitioners, the paper advocates for a shift toward locally-led, inclusive solutions that integrate indigenous knowledge with scientific projections. It proposes three primary investment pillars: enhancing people's skills and knowledge, building climate-resilient economies, and investing in nature-based solutions.
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Document type: Research paper
Accelerating adaptation action in Africa
The document outlines a strategic framework for accelerating climate adaptation in Africa, emphasizing the integration of indigenous knowledge with scientific data and the need for decentralized finance. It advocates for investing in a climate-smart workforce, resilient water and energy systems, and nature-based solutions to protect biodiversity and human livelihoods.
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Document type: Research paper
PROMOTING NON-MOTORIZED TRANSPORT IN NAIROBI
The study finds that nearly 50% of daily trips in Nairobi are made via non-motorized transport (NMT), yet these users account for 66.3% of traffic fatalities. Pedestrians are the most vulnerable, with a high concentration of deaths among males aged 20-44. Infrastructure is severely lacking, characterized by narrow or non-existent footpaths, poor lighting, and a lack of protected cycle lanes, particularly in low-income eastern districts. The report recommends expanding NMT networks, enhancing road safety enforcement, and improving street lighting and drainage to create a more inclusive and sustainable transport system.
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Document type: Report
Advancing gender equality and climate action
The document argues that gender-blind climate interventions risk deepening inequalities and undermining resilience. It proposes a project cycle that begins with representative stakeholder committees and gender-disaggregated data collection to understand differential vulnerabilities. The guide details tools like 'problem tree' analysis and the 'resilience wheel' to design transformative solutions. It emphasizes the use of SMART and SPICED indicators to track progress, illustrated through five case studies in Cambodia, Tanzania, Malawi, Nigeria, and Ecuador, which demonstrate the 'double win' of achieving both climate goals and gender empowerment.
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Document type: Guide
Ecosystem-based Flood Risk Management in Sub-Saharan Cities Summary Paper
The document examines urban flood challenges in five Sub-Saharan cities, highlighting the transition from traditional grey infrastructure to Integrated Flood Risk Management (IFRM) and Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA). It details specific interventions across Accra, Cape Town, Durban, Nairobi, and Mombasa, emphasizing that effective flood governance requires multi-stakeholder collaboration and the integration of social principles to protect vulnerable populations in informal settlements.
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Document type: Executive summary
People’s different vulnerabilities to climate change and their different abilities to be change-makers
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Document type: Report
Voices from the Frontline of Covid-19
The 'Voices from the Frontline of Covid-19' project, led by CDKN and ICCCAD, documented 50 stories from June 2020 to October 2021 to understand how vulnerable communities navigate the combined impacts of the pandemic and climate change. The project emphasizes the role of spontaneous community organizing, particularly leadership from women and young people, in maintaining progress toward Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including food security, health, and climate action. The document urges policy-makers to devolve decision-making to the local level, co-fund micro-finance mechanisms, and partner flexibly with local civil society organizations to build resilience against future shocks.
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Document type: Fact sheet
Voices from the Frontline of Covid-19
The report documents community-led responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and climate risks across the Global South, highlighting the role of social capital, women's leadership, and local innovation in maintaining development progress. It identifies specific grassroots solutions—such as community grain banks, urban kitchen gardens, and village savings groups—and argues for a shift in external support toward flexible, locally-led financing and partnerships that recognise the expertise of community-based organisations.
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Document type: Report
Ecosystem-based Flood Management
The report examines urban flooding in five cities across Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya, highlighting the vulnerability of informal settlements to climate-exacerbated rainfall and poor urban planning. It compares the maturity of South African cities in integrating EbA into policy against the more response-oriented, 'grey' infrastructure bias in Kenyan cities. Key findings emphasize that collaborative, whole-of-society governance and the integration of green and grey infrastructure are most effective for long-term resilience.
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Document type: Report
The ‘Climate and Society’ Game: People’s different vulnerabilities to climate change and their different abilities to be change-makers
The 'Climate and Society' game uses fictional scenarios in Ethiopia, India, and Latin America to simulate how factors such as gender, age, and socio-economic status create inequities in climate risk and resilience. Through a two-round role-play involving consultations and the review of adaptation plans, participants 'walk in other people's shoes' to identify barriers to inclusive participation. The guide emphasizes that climate investments must be designed specifically to empower marginalized groups and ensure equitable benefits, as a 'one size fits all' approach fails to accommodate diverse needs.
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Document type: Guide
Mobilising investment for NDC implementation in Peru's waste sector
The document examines the challenges and opportunities for private investment in Peru's waste sector to meet NDC goals. It evaluates specific technology options for landfills in Trujillo and San Juan Bautista, develops financial investment cases, and identifies systemic barriers such as high tax delinquency and lack of regulatory capacity. To address these, the paper proposes three priority measures: integrating waste tax collection into public utility bills, creating a national methodology for calculating waste service costs, and expanding the 'Work for Taxes' (OxI) scheme to final waste disposal infrastructure.
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Document type: Research paper
social-lottery_ethiopia-game_hanna-teen-girl-607dc7e8c280702b.pdf
The document describes the life of Hanna, a 13-year-old girl in Ethiopia facing severe hardships due to drought. Her daily life involves attending school and performing heavy household chores, specifically walking long distances to fetch water, which has become more difficult as drought increases wait times at boreholes and raises concerns about water contamination. The drought has caused significant economic instability; her father left for an Internal Displaced Persons camp with the family savings, leaving her mother to sell small food items to cover basic expenses and sanitary products. Consequently, Hanna is skipping meals due to rising food prices and lacks savings. While she is interested in climate-smart agricultural and livestock projects to improve local productivity and potentially convince her to stay in her community, her capacity to participate is limited by her age, lack of access to loans, and the time demands of her chores and studies.
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Document type: Guide
East Africa 00b Scenario
The document presents a scenario in Kul-Bayne, Ethiopia, where drought and resource scarcity threaten livelihoods. It outlines a series of proposed resilience measures developed by an Environmental Management Officer, including improved meteorological liaison, community radio weather forecasts, water-saving technologies, women-focused savings and loan schemes, bio-fertiliser kitchen gardens, and disaster risk reduction networks to protect vulnerable populations during heatwaves.
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Document type: Guide
social-lottery_ethiopia-game_sitra-sex-worker-e3913648d4c72e84.pdf
This document is a role-playing scenario for a 'social lottery' game designed to simulate the experiences of a 22-year-old commercial sex worker living with HIV in Ethiopia during a drought.
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Document type: Guide
social-lottery_ethiopia-game_zainab-environmental-worker-8d274953922c0e4d.pdf
The document outlines a simulation where a government worker in Kul-Bayne develops a climate adaptation plan focusing on drought and heatwave resilience. The proposed plan includes improving meteorological liaison, partnering with community radio for forecasts, accessing water-saving technologies, establishing loan schemes for women, creating kitchen gardens, and organizing disaster risk reduction support networks for vulnerable populations.
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Document type: Guide
Rural Ethiopian women diversify livelihoods and boost entire communities’ climate resilience
The Market Approaches to Resilience (MAR) project (2015-2019) aimed to reduce the vulnerability of rural Ethiopian pastoralists to climate shocks by diversifying their assets beyond livestock. By providing microfinance services—including loans, savings, and credit—the project enabled participants, particularly women, to establish small businesses and generate steady cash incomes. This financial diversification reduced the need for long-distance migration to find grazing land during droughts. The project employed a 'systems approach' that combined financial services with the restoration of depleted landscapes through the planting of trees and vegetation. A key focus was gender integration, with some Village Saving and Loan Associations (VSLA) reaching up to 80% female membership. The project reached 188,902 people, including 70,825 women, and demonstrated that pastoralist resilience can be improved without forcing a transition to a non-nomadic lifestyle. The authors conclude that systemic resilience requires longer funding cycles than the typical three-year period to ensure institutional gains are sustainable and to overcome barriers such as the reluctance of financial institutions to serve low-income, non-permanent settlements.
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Document type: Case study
Why invest in resilience?
The document highlights that Malawi loses approximately 1.7% of its GDP annually to droughts and floods, a rate significantly higher than the average for Least Developed Countries. It advocates for a 'triple dividend' approach to resilience—avoided losses, unlocked development potential, and co-benefits—noting that benefit-cost ratios for such investments can range from 3:1 to 50:1. The brief provides evidence from infrastructure, social protection, and climate-smart agriculture to support the claim that proactive resilience is more cost-effective than humanitarian aid.
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Document type: Policy brief
How to contribute climate change information to Wikipedia
The document argues that Wikipedia is a critical tool for communicating climate change information to a wider audience than academic journals, noting that it is often the first port of call for the general public and policymakers. It highlights a 'systemic bias' in Wikipedia's contributor base, which tends to be male and from developed countries, resulting in a lack of content from the Global South, particularly Africa. To address this, the guide provides detailed technical instructions on creating accounts, adding citations, using the Visual and Source editors, and navigating Talk pages. It also outlines the 'five pillars' of Wikipedia editing, emphasizing a neutral point of view and the necessity of verifiable sources. Furthermore, the guide explains how to join WikiProjects, such as WikiProject Climate Change, and provides a step-by-step framework for organizing 'edit-a-thons' to collaboratively improve specific topic areas.
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Document type: Guide
Inside Story: Empowering women as climate-smart agriculture leaders proves key to resilience
The document details a project in Campierganj, India, where the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG) implements climate-smart agriculture training. By focusing on gender-responsive approaches and empowering women—who comprise over 40% of the local agricultural workforce—the initiative has improved crop yields, increased women's income, and enhanced their social standing and leadership roles within the community.
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Document type: Case study