• Energy Research

The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a key carbon offset scheme that underpins the global carbon market. This mechanism leaves out many other non-carbon considerations, including the impacts of the CDM on water governance. The CDM produces credits primarily through energy projects and CDM funded hydropower is one of the most significant outcomes of nearly two decades of carbon financing with funding subsidizing over 1,000 large-scale dams. This research maps these rapidly built infrastructure projects in transboundary river systems, which has shown to have direct links to increasing hydropolitical tensions. The Mekong Region's Irrawaddy, Bei Jiang/Hsi, Red, and Salween rivers are all considered to be amongst the world's river basins considered ‘very high risk’ for conflict. Our research shows that these ‘very high risk’ rivers were the top four river basins to receive CDM funded large-scale hydropower. These four basins at ‘very high risk’ along with the Mekong River were the top five recipient rivers of 274 CDM subsidized large-scale dams. These dams were rapidly financed and constructed in the upstream catchments in the name of carbon reduction claims in China and Europe. This response to climate change enhances power imbalances and raises the risk of hydropolitical tensions as Mekong communities shoulder the costs of increasing insecurities in the name of distant carbon reduction claims in Europe and Beijing.

Welfare transitions are weakly understood in sub-Saharan Africa due to limited panel data to analyze trajectories of household escaping from, falling into, or remaining out of deprivation. We model data from 3500 households in coastal Kenya in three panels from 2014 to 2016 to evaluate determinants of welfare by multidimensional and subjective measures. Findings indicate that more than half of the households are deprived, with female-headed households being the most vulnerable and making the least progress. The subjective welfare measure identified three times more chronically poor households than the multidimensional metric (27% vs. 9%); in contrast, the multidimensional metric estimated twice as many ‘never poor’ households than the subjective measure (39% vs. 16%). The ‘churning poor’ were broadly consistent for both measures at roughly half the sample. Four welfare priorities converged from modelling welfare transitions. Broadening access to secondary education and energy services, improving the reliability and proximity of drinking water services, and ending open defecation improve welfare outcomes. While the policy implications do not align neatly with Kenya’s national and county government mandates, we argue that prioritising fewer but targeted sustainable development goals may improve accountability, feasibility, and responsibility in delivery if informed by local priorities and political salience.

Abstract To thrive in extreme conditions, organisms have evolved a diverse arsenal of adaptations that confer resilience. These species, their traits, and the mechanisms underlying them comprise a valuable resource that can be mined for numerous conceptual insights and applied objectives. One of the most dramatic adaptations to water limitation is desiccation tolerance. Understanding the mechanisms underlying desiccation tolerance has important potential implications for medicine, biotechnology, agriculture, and conservation. However, progress has been hindered by a lack of standardization across sub-disciplines, complicating the integration of data and slowing the translation of basic discoveries into practical applications. Here, we synthesize current knowledge on desiccation tolerance across evolutionary, ecological, physiological, and cellular scales to provide a roadmap for advancing desiccation tolerance research. We also address critical gaps and technical roadblocks, highlighting the need for standardized experimental practices, improved taxonomic sampling, and the development of new tools for studying biology in a dry state. We hope that this perspective can serve as a roadmap to accelerating research breakthroughs and unlocking the potential of desiccation tolerance to address global challenges related to climate change, food security, and health.

The devolution of governance to county level in Kenya provides a window for innovation in water policy and practice, critical to improving water security in rural areas where almost half of households lack basic water services. In rural Kitui County, Kenya, a number of projects supported by different funders have served as policy experiments over the past 10 years. We apply an action-oriented knowledge framework to explore the kinds of knowledge that have been produced in the course of these interventions and reflect on what kinds of knowledge are contributing to institutional change and how they are contributing to sustainability in the rural water sector. Actionable recommendations for the further development of county-level water policy include: First, ensure local ownership of the policy-making process whilst enabling appropriate technical and legal support; second, take long timeframes of institutional change into account in donor programming; third, establish water, sanitation and hygiene forums bringing diverse actors within the sector together to build cohesion, facilitate knowledge exchange, enable collaborative learning, and deliver collective action.

This data was collected through a survey of households in one subcounty of Kitui County Kenya with questions relating to water supply, welfare and living conditions. The survey was funded by the US government (USAID) Sustainable WASH Systems project in partnership with Kitui County Government and UNICEF. The sample consisted of 1457 households selected by random sampling of 40 households per village across the study area.