Climate +

For this special episode of our weekly podcast series, Devex EVP and Executive Editor Kate Warren sits down with leaders from Bayer and Mars who discuss the challenges and opportunities for the private sector in addressing climate change. 

For this special episode of our weekly podcast series recorded at COP29, Devex climate reporter Jesse Chase-Lubitz sits down with Kulthoum Omari-Motsumi from the Africa Adaptation Initiative, Patrick Verkooijen of the Global Center on Adaptation, and Tagaloa Cooper from the South Pacific Regional Environment Program.

Agriculture is both a driver of climate change, with around 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions coming from direct on farm emissions, and a potential game changer in mitigating it, if carried out sustainably. Yet currently agriculture receives only 4.3% of total mitigation and adaptation finance , making it an underutilized part of the solution to climate change. “Maybe an important conversatio...

As the COP 29 U.N. climate conference kicks off in Baku, Azerbaijan, we look ahead to the potential implications of the discussions on the global development sector. Labeled as the “finance COP,” one of the expected outcomes of the summit is a new financial goal for high-income countries to deliver to lower-income countries to address the challenges induced by climate change. With Trump’s recent r...

The agreement to operationalize a new fund for loss and damage was a key achievement of this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 28. But key questions remain about how that fund will work to get financial resources to countries experiencing the impacts of climate change. It’s part of a broader conversation about climate vulnerability and resilience — how to measure it, how it r...

The United Nations climate change conference in Dubai, or COP 28, was a big moment for food systems. For the first time, COP included a day dedicated to food and agriculture, which many see as an important signal that silos between climate and food policy are starting to break down. Still, less than 5% of climate finance is invested in food systems, despite the massive need for financial support f...

The annual climate conferences, or COPs, have become much more than just a forum for technical and political negotiations. They’re also a convening space for representatives from the likes of civil society, academia, and the private sector. Corporations now have an increasingly significant role to play in shaping the climate conversation and — crucially — in ensuring their own operations are envir...

The Paris Climate Agreement, established at COP 21 in 2015, calls for leaders and institutions across society to work towards reducing their carbon emissions with the aim of reaching net zero by 2050. Multilateral development banks, or MDBs, which have a critical role to play in the climate finance landscape, are in the process of figuring out what it means to deliver on their commitment to “Paris...

The United Nations climate conference, or COP 28, kicked off with a great deal of optimism as the loss and damage fund was established and countries made their first pledges to contribute. However, concerns remain on whether money channeled through the scheme will really reach its intended recipients. An alternative model to this is the one utilized by GiveDirectly, the U.K. charity that provides...

For too long, Indigenous peoples were sidelined from the climate negotiations process, despite being among the most directly affected by climate change. That changed at COP 26 in Glasgow, when for the first time in the history of the UN climate conferences, indigenous representatives were invited to engage directly and share experiences with governments. Indigenous leaders, however, argue that the...

Although it’s now widely recognized that they must be tackled together, the goals of poverty alleviation and climate action haven’t always been seen as interlinked. In fact, some development advocates continue to worry that a focus on addressing climate change will come at the expense of immediate human needs, especially in the most low-income and fragile countries. These debates have also played...

This year’s U.N. Climate Conference has already been a historic one in the nearly 30-year timespan of the COP process because it’s the first time there’s been a day dedicated to the linkages between climate change and health. Health advocates are drawing attention to the growing public health emergency surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, especially in the wake of controversial comments made b...

The United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP is an imperfect forum for achieving progress on climate change. The discourse that unfolds there is dominated by the global north. Any action agreed upon is nonbinding. It’s heavily attended — and influenced — by lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. It may not be the forum we need, but it’s the forum we have, Kumi Naidoo, a climate activ...

There was a time when world leaders and climate activists mostly spoke about climate change within the framework of mitigating its impacts by taking actions such as reducing fossil fuel consumption and the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses. Little was said about how to help communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Data is consistently showing us that climate change will most heavi...

The Bridgetown Initiative, an ambitious set of proposals to overhaul how development finance works spearheaded by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, has been front and center of discussions about climate finance since its unveiling at last year’s United Nations Climate Conference, or COP 27. The initiative aims to address some of the inequalities that exist in the current financial architecture,...

The decision to establish a loss and damage fund to provide financial assistance to countries affected by climate disasters was hailed as one of the biggest achievements at last year’s climate conference, or COP. One year later, reaching an agreement on how that fund will be operationalized is widely seen as a benchmark for success at COP 28. While negotiators managed to agree on a draft framework...

Hakima El-Haite knows what it takes to host a U.N. climate conference. The former Moroccan environment minister served as vice president of COP21 — where the Paris Climate Agreement was signed — and then played a key role in bringing the next climate summit to her home country. Since then, a global pandemic, debt crisis, multiple wars and rising geopolitical tensions have narrowed the space for in...

Climate + is our new twice-weekly podcast, publishing in the lead up to, during, and after this year's UN climate conference in Dubai. Join Devex senior reporter Michael Igoe and the Devex team as we speak with COP insiders and experts, campaigners, and contrarians to ask — can COP28 deliver?

In the final episode of COPcast, chef, food advocate and filmmaker Oliver English sits down with Kate Warren to discuss how regenerative agriculture and support for small scale farmers can help transform the global food system.

Rémy Rioux is chief executive officer of the French Development Agency, or AFD. But before that, in 2015, he worked as chief negotiator on the finance track of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate. Since then the United Nations Conference of the Parties has grown into a behemoth, with COP 27 in Egypt attracting 40,000 people. Devex sat down with Rioux on the sidelines of COP 27 to hear his thou...

At the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the calls for the restructuring of multilateral development banks are echoing through the halls, with the hopes that with reforms, finance will flow more readily to lower-income countries to allow them to green their economies and help their populations adapt to the changing world. In the 12th episode of the COPcast, D...

The private sector has a key role to play in investing in climate change adaptation – and yet, currently, only 1.6% of all adaptation funding comes from private investment. Matthias Berninger is the Head of Sustainability and Public Affairs at Bayer, but he’s seen many sides of the food and agriculture space over the course of his career: in the public sector, he was a vice minister in Germany’s G...

In the twelfth episode of COPcast, Devex sat down with Solomon Quaynor, vice-president for private sector, infrastructure and industrialization at the African Development Bank to discuss the continent’s climate financing needs.

Extreme weather devastated Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown in 2017 when torrential rains led to landslides that killed over 1,000 people. Now the city’s population is grappling with temperature increases and population swells due to people migrating from rural areas as erratic rainfall makes subsistence farming less sustainable. Freetown Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr is working to help her city...

This year world leaders have gathered at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Summit, or COP 27, as people around the world grapple with a food security crisis. An estimated 828 million people are chronically food insecure, and 345 million people are at crisis levels or worse. They are in need of food assistance as conflict, climate shocks, and the threat of global recession drive hunger levels...