The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
Climate change mitigation projects in developing countries have the potential for significant negative impacts on land users. In particular, land users with socially legitimate but informal tenure that is not recorded using a statutory process are at risk of exploitation from the powerful elite. A detailed understanding of de facto …
The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) has launched a book titled “How trees and people can co-adapt to climate change: Reducing vulnerability in multifunctional landscapes. The book, which was released on the sidelines of the Durban Climate Change Conference, focuses on the relationship between rural development and climate change mitigation and …
This report synthesises the present knowledge about the consequences that climate change can have for the Hindu Kush-Himalayan mountain system. It indicates gaps in knowledge and shows a way forward for the future. What is the relevance of this information? We think that it is necessary for people to be …
A quarter of world’s forests are in mountain areas. These forests typically have high biodiversity, and provide many goods and services for people both in the mountains and the lowlands, often far away. Mountain forests are important as sources of wood, as well as other products such as medical herbs. …
Mountains cover approximately one-quarter of the world’s surface and are home to 12 percent of the human population. By providing freshwater and other key environmental services to more than half of humanity, mountain ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of the planet and contribute significantly to the well-being …
This critique of the Green India Mission highlights the international political agenda motivating it as well as how this impacts communities and forest governance. The Government of India announced it’s first ever National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in June 2008 to identify measures and steps to advance climate …
This briefing gives an overview of the key REDD+ issues, in particular: integrating mitigation and adaptation actions; addressing tenure; learning from participatory forest management and payment for ecosystems services; taking the right approach to gender; developing safeguards to minimize negative impacts of REDD+; and strengthening South-South collaboration to reduce the …
In many countries, degraded ecosystems represent immense opportunity for both biodiversity restoration and human health. When properly designed, the restoration of ecosystems is a proven, safe and immediately available means to protect biodiversity and the vital benefits it provides. Restored ecosystems can improve resilience of both ecosystems and societies, and …
Ensuring that the poor or the most vulnerable sections of society benefit from REDD+ projects is crucial to building both national and international legitimacy and to fostering successful delivery of conservation and social objectives. In both academic and non-academic literature, issues of the equity of benefit-sharing at a community or …
The purpose of this manual is to provide guidance to indigenous trainers to prepare and conduct trainings on Community-based REDD+. These trainings should help communities acquire the knowledge and skills needed to take a decision on whether to join a REDD+ project, and if they do, to be able to …
This paper for the Bonn 2011 Conference presents initial evidence for how a nexus approach can enhance water, energy and food security by increasing efficiency, reducing trade-offs, building synergies and improving governance across sectors. It also underpins policy recommendations, which are detailed in a separate paper.
Climate change is predicted to have severe consequences for South Asia, particularly in agriculture, which employs more than 60 per cent of the region’s labour force. Adaptation efforts in South Asia have so far been fragmented, lacking a strong link between national climate change strategies and plans, and existing disaster …
This report contains a compilation of information on ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation. With a synthesis of the state of knowledge on ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation, this report provides an overview of how ecosystems can play a role in helping people adapt to climate change, through the compilation of examples and …
Tropical South America is rich in different groups of pollinators, but the biotic and abiotic factors determining the geographical distribution of their species richness are poorly understood. We analyzed the species richness of three groups of pollinators (bees and wasps, butterflies, hummingbirds) in six tropical forests in the Bolivian lowlands …
Determining how climate change will affect global ecology and ecosystem services is one of the next important frontiers in environmental science. Many species already exhibit smaller sizes as a result of climate change and many others are likely to shrink in response to continued climate change, following fundamental ecological and …
As a contribution to the Rio+20 process, this water toolbox is an output from the UN-Water conference on ‘Water in the Green Economy in Practice: Towards Rio+20’. The objective of this document is to provide proposals based on the analysis of existing practice, reflecting specifically on lessons from implementation, scaling …
This report contains abstracts of posters presented at the 15th Meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 7-11 November 2011, Montreal, Canada.
This new report is a global inventory of identified Payment for environmental services (PES) —water for cities? schemes and —pre PES water schemes? around the world.
Globally, soil organic matter (SOM) contains more than three times as much carbon as either the atmosphere or terrestrial vegetation. Yet it remains largely unknown why some SOM persists for millennia whereas other SOM decomposes readily—and this limits our ability to predict how soils will respond to climate change. Recent …
The first edition of the “Cities and Biodiversity Outlook” (CBO-1) will consist of a global assessment of the links between urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Combining science and policy, scientists from around the world will analyze how urbanization and urban growth impacts biodiversity and ecosystems, delivering key messages on the …
