World Water Week 2022

During this session our panel of experts presented an overview of prevailing groundwater development and management challenges in the South African Development Community (SADC) region and discussed interventions for groundwater governance through improvement of policy, legal and institutional frameworks, effective groundwater knowledge management, and mainstreaming groundwater governance into River Basin Organizations.      The USAID…

Final Report: USAID Guatemala Biodiversity Project

The Guatemala Biodiversity Project was a critical and timely response to growing trends impacting protected areas that, if continued, could have led to significant loss of key conservation gains made in Guatemala. The project addressed institutional and resource challenges and constraints at the heart of encroaching threats to key ecosystems. Through a local systems approach,…

Building Resilience into a River Basin

Along the Limpopo River, USAID is tackling severe water and sanitation challenges in targeted municipalities and protected areas from the river’s source in South Africa to its mouth at the Indian Ocean on the coast of Mozambique. This success story highlights how the Resilient Waters Program’s support to local municipalities living around the river to…

Final Report: Colombia Artisanal Gold Mining – Environmental Impact Reduction Activity

Oro Legal was a bold response to the governance and environmental challenges posed by artisanal and small gold mining (ASGM) in Colombia. Between September 2015 and April 2021, Oro Legal improved the social, economic, and environmental performance of ASGM operators through legalization and formalization and mitigated the environmental liabilities from past illegal mining. This final…

Balancing Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability in Indonesia

One-third of Indonesia’s 75,000 villages, home to 32 million people, lie within or adjacent to land dedicated by the government for forestry or conservation. All Indonesian citizens depend on healthy ecosystems for goods and services, including water, soil, forest products, and others that underpin sustainable development. However, weak governance, a lack of private sector commitment,…

Resilience Programming in Support of Reforestation: Emerging Lessons from Haiti

This brief focuses on three key lessons learned — the importance of social capital for resilience, leveraging social capital to establish community buy-in, and linking resilience activities to specific shocks. The USAID Reforestation project team applied this learning to implement a refined reforestation approach, which may be relevant to other projects incorporating components of resilience-building,…

Applying Blended Finance to Support the Conversion to Clean Cooking

Haiti’s trees and environment are the country’s natural capital. However, increasing population, migration to urban areas, worsening poverty, and lack of coherent national agricultural or energy policy has accelerated deforestation, severely limiting livelihood options for Haitian farmers. Increasingly, farmers depend on producing charcoal to rapidly growing urban areas to make ends meet, but inhaling smoke…

Virtual Event Strategy Guide

This document serves as a practical guide to those engaged in combatting wildlife crime across Southern Africa and beyond, on how to continue to work collaboratively in virtual events, despite continued restricted mobility and limited in-person gatherings. The guide was prepared by the USAID Combating Wildlife Crime Southern Africa program.

Luis Fernando Jara

Luis Fernando Jara is a forestry and climate change expert with 40 years of experience in project design and management, capacity building, and development of the forestry sector across the climatically diverse regions within Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Perú, Ecuador, and other parts of Latin America. He has extensive leadership experience in technical and managerial…

Final Report: USAID Regional Program for the Management of Aquatic Resources and Economic Alternatives

Biodiversity loss is one of Central America’s most pressing challenges. The five-year, $13.9 million USAID Regional Program for the Management of Aquatic Resources and Economic Alternatives, implemented by Chemonics International, was developed to strengthen coastal-marine resource management and biodiversity conservation while improving the livelihoods of local populations. Population growth in coastal marine areas, climate change,…