IIED's best of 2024: insights
As 2024 draws to a close, we're showcasing some of the content we've published during the last 12 months. Our insights offer a place for IIED staff and guest authors to share their personal views and experiences – in case you missed them, here are our top 10 most-read insights of the year.
Entrepreneurial farmer restoring the soils on her plot by installing water harvesting (Photo: Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
1. Loss and damage fund: two funding frameworks reimagining climate finance delivery
How can the governing board of the new loss and damage fund ensure it offers best value for money and reaches those most in need while avoiding the mistakes made by previous climate funds? IIED’s Ritu Bharadwaj suggests five priorities for reimagining how the fund might work.
Taking cues from international successes, the loss and damage fund should focus on developing a digitised, integrated beneficiary database. For example, India’s DBT scheme’s use of the Aadhaar digital identification system has successfully reduced bureaucracy, ensuring timely and secure transfers directly to beneficiaries.
2. Rethinking urbanisation and economic development
Ivan Turok, South African National Research Foundation chair at the University of the Free State, looks at the often assumed connection between urbanisation and increased standards of living for city residents in order to understand if it is a coincidence and how governments should address it.
What we do know is that over the next few decades virtually all the world’s population growth will occur in urban centres. Most of this will happen in Asia and Africa, which is why it’s crucial to anticipate whether or not people will be better or worse off. And why it’s vital for governments to act in ways that enable cities to create pathways to prosperity.
3. Indigenous Peoples are the real solutions to the nature and climate crises
In this pre-COP16 insight, IIED principal researcher Krystyna Swiderska highlighted the need to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities for their tried and tested solutions.
Indigenous Peoples have repeatedly called for solutions that protect their rights to land and self-determination, as per the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Protecting Indigenous territories can deliver large-scale emissions reductions by conserving tropical forests, grasslands, wetlands and savannahs. But their voices are still marginal in policymaking.
4. The fastest-growing cities in Latin America and the Caribbean
Urban specialist David Satterthwaite looks at the cities in Latin America and the Caribbean that have populations growing by hundreds of thousands each year and tries to understand the consequences of this rapid growth.
But in each of these cities we need to understand the varied, complex and ever-changing specific local contexts and subtleties, and changing government, private and public external influences. And, of course, how the climate crisis develops and how cities respond.
5. Scaling up social protection for food security in a climate-constrained world
Ahead of the G20 Leaders’ Summit, IIED principal researcher Ritu Bharadwaj and executive director Tom Mitchell presented the urgent need for major decision-making platforms to fully integrate climate risks into their food security strategies.
A recent paper published by IIED shows how anticipatory social protection can act as a proactive solution that can help vulnerable countries manage risks and develop resilience before a food crisis reaches critical level. Research has consistently highlighted the value of acting early: for every dollar invested in anticipatory measures, up to US$15 can be saved in emergency aid and recovery costs.
6. How to fix funding bottlenecks and pave the way for locally led adaptation
IIED researcher May Thazin Aung and BRAC International’s Sousan Suha share the findings of a survey exploring the operational bottlenecks preventing local organisations from accessing climate adaptation funding, and explain how funders can smooth the way for locally led adaptation (LLA).
Our experience shows that local organisations in the global South working hard to implement LLA face significant challenges, due to complex climate finance access rules. Adopted by climate funders and intermediaries, these rules are burdensome and often hinder LLA by restricting the flow of funds to local organisations.
7. Defining housing justice: an audiovisual exchange of struggle and action
Addressing the current global housing requires a justice lens. In this insight, IIED researchers Camila Cociña and Alexandre Apsan Frediani shed light on what housing justice looks like for those on the front line of injustice via a series of videos.
Importantly, the discussion revealed the importance of exchanging and organising in ways that not only document existing struggles, but also provide a platform for collective and coordinated action. Our efforts to collectively define housing justice are, above all, a call for new ways to engage with the reality of the global housing crisis – a crisis that is preventing millions of people from living a fulfilling life, and a crisis that is largely sustained by systems that are unresponsive to most people’s realities.
8. Can Europe’s new deforestation regulation address concerns about trade and climate justice?
The European Union’s Deforestation Regulation has provoked a backlash from producer countries who argue that it will put a disproportionate burden on them, and increase climate injustices. IIED head of law Lorenzo Cotula and consultant Anirudh Nanda take a closer look at the regulation, its implications and at what producer countries are calling for.
Depending on how it is implemented, the EUDR could add a significant burden on producers and exporters in developing countries to meet compliance costs. Cumbersome compliance requirements could particularly penalise smallholders – who have contributed little to global climate change and who, as the joint letter noted, could be excluded from the EU market ’not because they have deforested their land but due to their inability to show compliance’.
9. Navigating climate adaptation in urban Africa: lessons from Kigali
Partners Parveen Kumar and Emmanuel Mwenje look at the Rwanda capital’s experience of addressing climate risks and how it offers valuable insights into the complexities of urban climate adaptation – highlighting the intricate interplay between local and national governments, urban planning processes, community engagement and climate justice.
Kigali's experience offers valuable lessons for other African cities navigating climate adaptation. Climate change is a dynamic and evolving phenomenon, requiring adaptation strategies to be flexible and responsive to new climate information and changing conditions.
10. A missed opportunity: why COP29’s broken promises will leave billions behind
IIED executive director Tom Mitchell reflects on COP29 as a ‘squandered opportunity’ to address the climate emergency and calls for reform of the COP process, to ensure adaptation and loss and damage finance reach those who most need it.
The failure of wealthier nations to provide meaningful adaptation finance or pathways to resilience for the most climate-vulnerable countries is devastating, especially when action on emissions has fallen short and the price tag of dealing with the impacts is rising steeply.
That's our top 10 – but there were many more! To see all our 2024 opinion pieces, visit our insights page where we give our experts and partners the platform to provide insight into key events, updates on ongoing research, and share experiences from their work.
