Indigenous Intelligence Belongs at the Centre of Climate and Disaster Policy
Every 9 August, the world pauses for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The date was set by General Assembly resolution 49/214, and it marks the first meeting, in 1982, of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Commemoration is easy. What the day now demands is harder, and it starts with language. We […]
The Cheque That Arrives Before the Loss Adjuster
Fifteen weeks separate Stockholm from Abu Dhabi, long enough to make three water finance instruments so ordinary that any country can simply request them The water sector has been handed an unusually clean sequence this year. Stockholm meets from 23 to 27 August for World Water Week. Abu Dhabi convenes the UN Water Conference from […]
What Europe Can Learn From Countries That Have Been Adapting Longer
Half of England was declared in drought this summer, the second time in two years, with seven water companies restricting some twenty-three million customers. In Hungary, groundwater in places sits metres below where it stood a decade ago, and low water on the Danube shut down all but one of the cooling-dependent turbines at the Paks nuclear […]
Water-Related Actions as a Strategic Catalyst for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation
Water is treated almost everywhere as a way to adapt to climate change. It is also a direct and low cost way to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and today’s funding rules keep that value out of reach. Counting and financing water as mitigation would bring in private capital and lower emissions without slowing development. Climate […]
Catalysing Climate Resilient SMEs for Sustainable Trade
When a flash flood washes out a feeder road in the Mekong Delta, or a drought withers a smallholder’s maize in the Sahel, headlines fixate on hectares lost and tonnes of grain forgone. The quieter casualty is the small business owner. The woman aggregating produce, the cooperative shipping coffee, and the workshop welding irrigation pumps. […]
The Year Water Became Investable
By Bapon Fakhruddin, Climate Investment Principal, Green Climate Fund In barely ten days this April, the global water conversation crossed two continents and two very different institutional cultures. On 15 April, the World Bank Group used its Spring Meetings in Washington to launch Water Forward, a new coalition built on a deceptively simple proposition: that […]
From Warnings to (In)Action: Global Risks 2020 vs 2026
Why the World Remains on the Brink & How to Bend the Trajectory When the World Economic Forum surveyed over 1,300 experts for its Global Risks Report 2026, the verdict was grim. Half expect a turbulent or stormy world over the next two years, a 14-percentage-point surge from the previous year, and only one percent […]
Climate Finance Must Build Peace Where Conflict and Climate Collide
I have been thinking about a woman I met in Mogadishu two years ago. She had walked two days to reach a training session on drought-resilient seeds. When I asked her what worried her most, she did not say rainfall. She said the road home. That answer has stayed with me. It captures a truth […]
The 1% Problem and the Trillion Dollar Case for Investing in Nature
The global economy rests on a set of natural systems that quietly deliver climate stability, water security, and protection from extreme risk, yet finance continues to treat them as peripheral. Mangroves, wetlands, watersheds, and degraded lands underpin trillions of dollars in economic activity, but they receive only a sliver of global climate and development capital. […]
Water at the Nexus of Human and Planetary Health
Water is the medium through which the three pillars of the One Health paradigm for human, animal, and environmental health most directly interact, yet a 2025 review published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences concludes that One Health “remains narrowly focussed on traditional issues such as infectious diseases, zoonosis, antimicrobial resistance, and food […]