WRI Insights

As two of the 10 largest economies in the world, China and Brazil both face significant challenges from degraded lands. A new long-term cooperation aims to learn from each others' experiences in landscape restoration.

What is an equitable way of taking action in the context of growing emissions and climate impacts, from water scarcity and depressed agricultural yields to severe weather events? And how can we reduce emissions and build climate resilience while taking into account varying human development needs?

Adaptation finance accountability is key to addressing obligations of national governments and international organizations to provide support, but actual funding decisions are often made without involving the populations hit first and worst by climate change, or without understanding how communities are vulnerable. So who is accountable for making good use of adaptation funds, and who should hold whom accountable?

A new collaboration between WRI and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture lets users of [Global Forest Watch](http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/global-forest-watch) visualize and analyze tree cover loss alerts for all of Latin America with a near-real time deforestation monitoring system called Terra-i.

In a blog post originally published for National Geographic, Manish Bapna discusses India's low carbon future.

Today, WRI, the [C40](http://c40.org/) Cities Climate Leadership Group, and [ICLEI](http://www.iclei.org/) – Local Governments for Sustainability are launching the final version of [the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventories (GPC)](http://www.ghgprotocol.org/greenhouse-gas-protocol-accounting-reporting-standard-cities). It’s the first internationally accepted standard for measuring emissions at the city level, and empowers cities to accurately identify where their emissions are coming from, set credible and achievable reduction targets, and consistently track progress.

Climate change negotiations at COP 20 in Lima, Peru, have reached their mid-point and are moving into high gear. This week will be crucial as talks continue on a draft international climate agreement due to be concluded in Paris at the end of 2015. Here are three issues to watch.

Between 2001 and 2012, Latin America and the Caribbean [lost 36 million hectares](http://faostat3.fao.org/home/E) of forest and grassland to agricultural expansion, and nearly half of the region's greenhouse gas emissions are the result of land-use change, forestry, and agriculture. So there’s a clear solution to curbing climate change in the LAC region—[restore life](http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/05/restoration-it%E2%80%99s-about-more-just-trees) to its degraded landscapes. That's where Initiative 20x20 comes in.

Coverage of Japan’s coal funding has sparked an important debate about the role of international climate finance in facilitating the transition to a low-carbon economy.

In fast-urbanizing China, nearly 90 percent of coastal cities face some degree of water scarcity and roughly 300 million rural residents lack access to clean water. To quench the country’s chronic thirst, the Chinese government has turned to desalination, aiming to produce as much as 3 million cubic meters of desalinated water daily by 2020, up from today’s 0.77 million cubic meter.