Despite headway made in recent years, the decentralised renewable energy sector is still at an early stage and investing in this sector presents the significant challenge of matching the type and scale of finance offered by investors with the finance needs of small-scale energy access for unelectrified households.

Angola’s civil war caused a massive population movement from rural conflict areas to low-lying coastal zones between 1975 and 2002. More than half of Angola’s 27 million people now live in urban coastal settlements, floodplains and steep ravines vulnerable to climate extremes.

In recent years, the governments of the Sahel have committed to combat poverty and food insecurity through a significant increase in the development of irrigable areas.

Smallholder farmers in coastal Kenya are already significantly affected by climate change, particularly in semi-arid and dryland areas. They have developed a number of innovations to enhance resilience and productivity, eg. crop diversification using resilient local varieties, new planting techniques and wild tree domestication.

Do you want to highlight how biodiversity contributes to economic and social development, and ensure its potential is realised? Do you want to ensure biodiversity opportunities and risks are no longer ignored by development policy, plans and budgets? Or perhaps you want to mainstream development concerns into biodiversity policy and planning?

Forest cover in sub-Saharan Africa declined by nearly 10 per cent between 2000 and 2010. Of this loss, 75 per cent was caused by the conversion of forest to agriculture, largely for food production to serve rapidly growing domestic food demand.

In India, peri-urban areas are too often neglected. Many people live in poverty and face increasing marginalisation and food insecurity. Yet peri-urban agriculture could be a major contributor to poverty alleviation and food security.

In India, peri-urban areas are too often neglected. They are fraught with institutional ambiguity, unplanned growth, poor infrastructure and environmental degradation. Many peri-urban inhabitants live in poverty and face increasing marginalisation and food insecurity.

Access to land is at the heart of rural livelihoods. In sub-Saharan Africa, the pace and scale at which land is changing hands are increasing fast.

Wildlife crime has come under increasing international scrutiny in recent years, with ever more money being spent on activities to combat it. However, little is known about what drives local people to become involved in wildlife crime, or about which interventions are likely to be most effective in tackling it.