All projects and articles

We are working with partners in China, India, Kenya and Peru to revitalise the traditional knowledge-based — or ‘biocultural’ — innovation systems of smallholder farmers to strengthen food security in the face of climate change.

Members of parliament can help break the international stalemate on climate change action by ‘domesticating’ global decisions, using national legislation. But to do that they often need long-term capacity-building programmes to catalyse the process: programmes that have support within the Government and across parliaments.

In 2010 IIED worked on a programme to build parliamentary capacity to adapt to and mitigate climate change in southern African countries. We commissioned ‘in country’ researchers to work with parliamentarians and their staff as they described and assessed the parliamentary institutions, their roles and relationships within government, and their effectiveness at addressing climate change issues. The programme included a study of Scotland to offer a comparison with a more developed nation.

IIED is examining the ideas, resources and ‘power dynamics’ that shape how the Climate Investment Funds achieve development impacts. Together, these factors make up the ‘political economy’, and examining them will help governments and development organisations understand how climate investment funds can best bring about the transformational change the funds aim for.

Public sector planning plays a key role in making regions and countries resilient to climate change. But tackling climate change’s huge potential impacts will stretch limited public sector resources to the limit. With partners we are exploring how to use sequence and synchrony to make climate change planning, and public sector interventions, most effective — to help them deliver ‘more than the sum of their parts’.

IIED works to help support southern countries as they adapt to climate change and the extreme weather events it brings. We do this by supporting partner organisations and experts that offer climate change adaptation training, advocacy and capacity building.

The drylands are home to 2.3 billion people. IIED’s Drylands Programme started in 1987, when ruinous droughts in the African Sahel led people to write off drylands as overexploited wastelands. Through action research, targeted training and wide-ranging publications, IIED and its partners have gathered evidence and shaped policy. Concepts and tools from the programme have been widely adopted by national and regional institutions. This archive page links to past projects managed by IIED in the African drylands, or with pastoralists.