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 […]
Scaling Climate Finance For Locally-led Adaptation: Lessons From The Global South
As the frequency and impacts of climate events increase, the demand for local-level adaptation becomes urgent. The adaptation finance received by developing and least developed countries is estimated at less than USD 25 billion per year, which is far less than the required USD 215 billion per year. Further, the evidence indicates that less than […]
Water Security Demands a Systems Change and Programmatic Approach
2026 March 18, We celebrated World Water Day and UNESCO’s World Day for Glaciers. Rising global temperatures are causing glaciers to retreat at an alarming rate, disrupting the water cycle and threatening water supplies for millions, while droughts and floods intensify and water scarcity spreads. Already, over 2 billion people lack safe drinking water, mostly […]
Why disaster risk financing must evolve to meet the climate crisis
As the climate crisis accelerates, our approach to disaster risk financing must evolve. Traditional models are no longer enough, and we need systems that are faster, fairer, and more flexible to meet the growing challenges. Read my thought piece in the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)’s DRR Community Voices series, which offers […]