In September 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK-based Commonwealth Secretariat announced that it had dispatched highly skilled climate finance advisors to four member nations to help them navigate the often-complicated process of accessing climate funds. Belize, the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) only Central American member, was one of the recipients.
Judy Wangari is one of an estimated 800,000 smallholder potato farmers who, according to the National Potato Council of Kenya, contribute at least 83 percent of the total potato production.
A key outcome of COP26 climate summit is the enhanced focus on “nature-based solutions” – the plans for people to work closely alongside nature to avert a planetary catastrophe.
On Gladys Habu’s birthday, she filmed a message to world leaders while standing waist-deep in the sea next to a dead tree stump – the only remnant of Kale Island now submerged underwater due to climate-change-induced sea-level rise.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland has appealed to world leaders attending the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 to close the gap in ongoing negotiations this week in Glasgow, with millions of lives and livelihoods on the line in climate-vulnerable countries.
A new toolkit launched in the margins of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 aims to unlock clean energy investments for small island nations, many of whom rely heavily on imported fossil fuels for power generation.
Climate change experts and leaders from the Commonwealth member states rallied behind calls to accelerate climate finance for nature-based solutions to arrest the pace of climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.
Breaking the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and accelerating the global uptake of renewable energy will play a decisive role in diminishing the threat of global warming to the survival of life on earth, according to experts. But turning the vision into reality will demand unwavering political will and, critically, massive investment, which can no longer be shouldered solely by aid and development partners.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland has called for all countries to deliver an ambitious and transformative outcome at the imminent UN Climate Change Conference COP26, while appealing for increased support for the smallest and most vulnerable nations.
There is no country today that has not experienced the effects of climate change, from changing weather patterns to extreme, devastating weather events.
Jenifer Kamba, 33, has always loved farming – a love passed on to her by her late husband after they married 14 years ago. The young farmer duo grew maise, pepper and vegetables on their two-acre farm in Kivandini of Kenya’s Machakos county. Even after her husband died five years ago, Kamba didn’t stop farming. However, of late, the soil looks dry, and her production has declined considerably.
After an unprecedented pan-Commonwealth search for innovative satellite-driven solutions to tackle the challenges of the climate emergency and ocean sustainability, the
Satellite Applications Catapult and the Commonwealth Secretariat are delighted to announce the inaugural finalists of the
Hack the Planet competition 2021.
Smelly, boggy, and full of bugs, mangroves’ superpowers are well hidden. However, there is rising confidence that mangroves are the silver bullet to combat the effects of climate change.
More than 2,000 young leaders and youth-led organisations from across the Commonwealth are urging governments to respect the needs and contributions of the world’s most vulnerable groups, in the lead up to global climate talks in Glasgow in November.
Sepesa Curuki and his community are coming to terms with the prospect of relocation from Cogea village on Fiji’s second-largest island of Vanua Levu. Their village, which lies between two rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean only 2km away, has been battered by intense and frequent cyclones, flooding and erosion, threatening their very existence.
The Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland called for urgent action to ensure improved climate resilience of small states and promised to amplify the concerns of small and other vulnerable states around climate change at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow this November.
The UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme (IPP) CommonSensing is led by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) through the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), which is working with selected partners including the Commonwealth Secretariat, to improve resilience to the effects of climate change in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
This November, five years after signing the Paris Agreement and pledging to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a further target of below 1.5 degrees Celsius, world leaders will meet in Glasgow, UK amid COVID-19 pandemic shocks, rising hunger and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that warns of more extreme temperature, droughts, forest fires and ice sheet loss due to human activity.