Combating Desertification and Drought

Afghanistan’s Drought Deepens, and Women Bear the Heaviest Burden

Drought has depleted wells, withered fruit trees, and reduced crop yields across Afghanistan. The heaviest burden of the water shortage falls on women in their daily lives, as they must fetch water from increasingly distant sources and use every single drop with extreme care.

What Faith Can Teach Agriculture

By Hugh Locke
Years ago, standing in a small farmer's field in Haiti, I began to suspect that we had agriculture backward. The development world saw a man in need of rescue. I saw a farmer who might help rescue the rest of us.

Overshoot of Paris Agreement and the Looming Super El Niño Drive Urgent Calls for Global Climate Action at UNGA 81

By Oritro Karim
The United Nations 2026 Climate Summit addressed critical strategies to mitigate the compounding impacts of the climate crisis and accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

BRAZIL: ‘Resistance Is Intergenerational, and Art Is How Energy Gets Renewed’

By CIVICUS

 
CIVICUS discusses the role of art in climate and rights struggles in the Brazilian Amazon with Tom Wheeler, executive director and co-founder of Treesistance. Treesistance is a platform operated by the Netherlands-based Sinchi Foundation that partners with Indigenous communities across four Brazilian states on cultural preservation and forest protection.

The Overlooked Fast Track for Cutting Planetary Warming

By V. Ram Ramanathan, Durwood Zaelke and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco
Among the three of us, we have 15 decades of high-level experience in climate science, policies and actions, and we have never been more alarmed than we are at this moment. The United Nations has just officially declared that the world has failed in limiting global warming to a safe level. During the last decade, heat-trapping pollutants nearly doubled the rate that heat is being added to the planet—a rate that will push temperatures across the 1.5°Celsius threshold in five years or less and breach the first barrier of the Paris Agreement. This will further destabilize natural climate systems and amplify weather extremes, which are already costing the world economy more than $ 2 trillion annually. At the current rate of warming, the global temperature is likely to cross 2° Celsius in about 15 years, the outer limit of the Paris Agreement, taking us into a climate not witnessed by homo sapiens, ever.

What Isn’t Named Isn’t Protected and being Named Isn’t Enough

By Bayarsaikhan Namsrai, Gregoria Jimenez Amaya, Isabel Davila Pereira and Stephen Basele
Rightsholders came to Ulaanbaatar from across the world, carrying declarations, demands and years of experience defending the lands on which their communities depend. Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth were equally clear about what they needed from COP17. But being in the room is not the same as having power in the room.

Africa’s Rangelands Are the Frontline of Resilience – COP17 Showed Why

By Samson Kuraru
Across the Kenya-Tanzania rangelands, communities have long understood a reality that the global community is increasingly recognising: healthy rangelands support livelihoods, wildlife, water resources and local economies. They are among Africa's most important natural assets and a foundation for resilience in a changing climate.

Africa Has the Answers to Its Food Security Challenges. What It Needs Is the Architecture to Act on Them

By Ismahane Elouafi
As leaders gather in Kigali for the Africa Food Systems Forum, they face an urgent question: why do so many proven agricultural innovations still fail to reach the farmers and communities that need them most?

The Drylands Dividend: The Smart Investment for Powering a Water-Scarce World

By Éliane Ubalijoro and Salina Abraham
Open a can of something fizzy and the reason the sugar doesn’t separate immediately is gum arabic, tapped by hand from acacia trees across the Sahel. Spray on perfume and the reason the scent is still there at dinner is frankincense, a resin cut from Boswellia trees on the dry escarpments of the Horn of Africa. The fat that gives a chocolate bar its snap may well be shea, gathered and pressed by women in the parkland belt of West Africa. The cashmere jumper came from goats that can only be raised on cold, dry rangelands.

Africa’s Pastoralists Need More Than COP17’s $1.2 billion Rangelands Pledge

By Kizito Makoye
When the rains fail across Tanzania’s northern Maasai Steppe, herders drive their cattle farther in search of pasture and water.

GEF Proposes $140 Million Program to Strengthen Drought Resilience

By Kizito Makoye
For pastoralists in Arvaikheer — a village in Mongolia’s dry central plains — rain can determine whether there is enough grass for cattle to roam, whether waterholes are replenished and whether families make it through another dry season. But as climate change makes rainfall increasingly unpredictable, even a wet season may no longer provide water and pasture needed to sustain people and livestock.

Indigenous Peoples Call for Meaningful Influence in Climate Discussions — Nia Tero

By Naureen Hossain
Indigenous communities have long advocated for the environment through the lens of their traditional knowledge systems and cultures. But much more work needs to be done to translate their presence into influence.

Nairobi Biodiversity Talks Set the Stage for Key COP17 Decisions

By Stella Paul
Despite record participation in global biodiversity reporting and planning processes, countries remain off track to meet the world's 2030 biodiversity goals, according to discussions that concluded this month at two key meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

As Mongolia Hosts COP17, Pastoralists Demand Space to Move, Survive and Restore

By Kizito Makoye
After moving more than 6,000 km across Eurasia, the Silk Road Caravan has reached Mongolia with stories from pastoralists whose livelihoods are increasingly threatened by drought, degraded land and shrinking access to grazing areas.

The Earth Is Burning — And We Are Still Choosing to Let It

By James Alix Michel
I have spent my life on an island. From the granite hills of Mahé, one can watch the sun rise over an ocean that has fed, protected and defined the Seychellois people for centuries.

Why Pastoral Production Requires Regional Coordination, Harmonised Policy

By Isaiah Esipisu
At the 64th sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB64) under the UNFCCC in Bonn, Germany, the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP) underscored the importance of ethically and equitably incorporating indigenous values and knowledge and local knowledge systems such as pastoralism into climate policies and actions ahead of the 31st Conference of Parties on climate change (COP31).

Invasive Prickly Pear Turned into Food, Clean Energy Source

By Wilson Odhiambo
An international academic partnership is helping turn one of Laikipia County’s most destructive and invasive plants, the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia stricta), into a source of food security and clean energy while also helping end perennial resource conflict in the region.

Inside GEF’s Blended Finance Push: Turning Public Money Into Private Capital Leverage

By Kizito Makoye
For most of the Eighth Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Assembly last month, the atmosphere inside Samarkand’s sprawling Congress Centre echoed a growing confidence of global environmental policymakers.

Central Asia Bets on a New Water–Land Pact to Survive Environmental Degradation

By Kizito Makoye
As ministers, diplomats and development officials assembled in Samarkand Congress Centre for a ceremonial family photograph, the mood carried unusual symbolism. Behind the smiles and formalities stood a region confronting a harder reality: rivers are shrinking, soils are tiring, temperatures are rising, and the old ways of managing land and water are no longer working.

GEF Pushes Innovation, Blended Finance Ahead of the Eighth Assembly

By Stella Paul and Kizito Makoye
As the Global Environment Facility (GEF) steps into the starting blocks of its next financial cycle, the Interim CEO Claude Gascon reflects on what he termed a “moment of transition and delivery".

World Environment Day, 2026


 
2025 was one of the three hottest years ever recorded. The years from 2015 to 2025 were the hottest eleven years on record.
Next Page »
*#*