The impact of climate change and El Niño is increasingly causing coral reefs to bleach. WWF’s Friends of the Reef project is an effort to protect Asia Pacific’s coral reef ecosystems, which are the source of new coral recruits for reefs throughout the region and a source of livelihood for coastal people, especially in the fishery and tourism sectors. Friends of the Reef engages local stakeholders and decision makers in developing, testing, and implementing plans to increase coral reef resilience to major threats in the region, including climate change.

Upland farmers and their families, who number about 20 million, comprise the poorest of the poor in the Philippines. Their livelihoods depend on cultivating marginal hilly land areas which are very vulnerable to climate related risks. This overall goal of this multi-organization project is to promote climate change adaptation by upland farmers in watersheds at the national level in the Philippines.

The waru waru restoration project began in 1991 in the southern Andean department of Puno, Peru.  The aim is to recover a technology, invented by the Tiahuanaco culture, that fell into disuse around 1100 A.D.  Archaeological excavations of raised fields demonstrated that farmers began constructing them by 1000 BC.  Waru waru, or raised field, agriculture makes it possible to bring into production the low-lying, floodprone, poorly drained lands found all over the Altiplano.  The project involves the restoration of earthworks that are central to the technology.

The World Bank began a project in 1983 that involved installing 15,000 of low-cost shallow tube well technology combined with small engine-driven water pumps, a new technology that soon acquired the name “fadama irrigation”.

In 2004, GTZ started a project entitled “Adaptation to Climate Change through Risk Management” with selected rural communities on the south-western Pacific coast and in the autonomous North Atlantic Region with the aim of improving their capacity to adapt to climate change by means of strengthened disaster risk management.  The project also sought to integrate this capacity into their planning processes. One part of the project was conducted with indigenous Miskito communities along the Rio Tungky in the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic.

Chitwan is the most flood prone among the districts of Nepal.  People regularly experience losses of land, property and biodiversity as well as food shortages.  The Intermediate Technology Development Group implemented a community-based disaster management program in cooperation with DIPECHO (Disaster Preparedness program of the European Commission Humanitarian aid Office) to reduce the impact of floods by strengthening the capacity of local communities to set up early warning systems.

Recently, the Knowledge and Research program from CARE and the Nepal Red Cross Society together with Jaleshwar Municipality began implementing community-based low cost flood risk reduction measures through action planning.  The project enhanced the capacity of communities to cope with and manage flood disasters by building institutional capacities through establishing various committees including, Community Based Disaster Management Committee, Disaster Preparedness Subcommittees, First Aid Subcommittees, Disaster Relief Subcommittees, and Coordination Subcommittees.  These committees were pr

One of the most dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal is the Tsho Rolpa Lake. At an altitude of about 5000m, the size of this lake increased from 0.23 sq.km. in 1957 to 1.65 sq.km. by 1997.  Tsho Rolpa was estimated to store approximately 90-100 million cu.m.

The objective of the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Program (WAAPP) Support Project is to generate and disseminate improved technologies in the participating countries’ top priority areas that are aligned with the region’s top priorities, as identified by Central Africa Counsel for Agricultural Research (CORAF). These include roots and tubers in Ghana; rice in Mali; and cereals in Senegal. The project has four main components. The first component is enabling conditions for regional cooperation in technology generation and dissemination.

Maize is one of the main staple foods in Southern Africa. However, droughts and poor soil often result in small harvests or even total harvest failure. The New Seed Initiative for Maize in Southern Africa has been developing maize varieties with tolerance to drought, certain diseases and soil lacking in nutrients since 1996.