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Many households in Cameroon live in energy poverty. Thus, energy usage and energy efficiency have become increasingly important in Cameroon. An important step towards improving building energy efficiency is knowledge about household energy appliances. In Cameroon, the construction sector is mostly informal, presenting huge challenges for stakeholders including clients or dwelling owners to establish quality factors of household energy appliances for use in various building projects. Furthermore, studies about household energy appliances are scarce. The aim of this study is to investigate household energy appliances in relation to energy efficiency in dwellings. To achieve this aim, 15 dwellings in the political capital Yaounde of Cameroon were surveyed. Given the wider nature of building energy efficiency and the limited research materials about the same, the scope was limited to typology of household energy appliances, typical dwellings’ characteristics and energy consumption pattern. Some factors that have influence on energy consumption/pattern such as occupants’ daily activities were also considered. Although this study is still in its preliminary stages, the findings reported here can be useful in conducting detail research in the future.

As climate change increasingly affects the world, much is said about the rising amounts of aid required to support emergency response, long-term development to adapt, and peacebuilding to ensure that conflict does not undermine these efforts. Bringing these ideas together, some advocate for the addition of a separate climate change stream into the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus (or triple nexus). Based on a critical literature review and synthesis, this article articulates and conceptualizes how climate change perspectives and actions should be integrated into the existing streams of the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus, rather than being added as a separate stream. The analysis shows the risks of adding climate change as a stand-alone stream and advocates for developing long-term strategies that integrate climate change actions into humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts to better serve all three.

Traditional top-down strategies to reduce climate-change-related risks have often failed to produce tangible results in vulnerable urban areas of the Global South. Approaches based on the co-production of adaptation solutions between diverse stakeholders offer promising alternative strategies. This contribution draws on our experiences in growing informal and low-income urban areas in two Latin American cities, Medell�n (Colombia) and Puebla (Mexico). These communities lack adequate access to clean water and are exposed to risks related to increasingly frequent high-intensity rainfall events, making water management a key consideration for risk reduction. However, the factors driving insufficient water access and the perceptions of risks vary in each location, demonstrating the need for context-specific solutions. We explore how increasing community agency and co-creating knowledge for risk management between diverse stakeholders at a range of geographical scales can contribute to redressing existing social and environmental injustices, by identifying, implementing, and scaling up technically appropriate and culturally sustainable solutions aimed at reducing climate-change-related risks.

The overarching goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate methods that support effective agro-pastoral risk management in a changing climate. Disaster mitigation strategies, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), emphasize the need to address underlying causes of disaster risk and to prevent the emergence of new risks. Such assessments can be difficult, because they require transforming changes in meteorological outcomes into sector-specific impact. While it is common to examine trends in seasonal precipitation and precipitation extremes, it is much less common to study how these trends interact with crop and pasture water needs. Here, we show that the Water Requirement (WR) component of the widely used Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (WRSI) can be used to enhance the interpretation of precipitation changes. The WR helps answer a key question: was the amount of rainfall received in a given season enough to satisfy a crop or pasture's water needs? Our first results section focuses on analyzing spatial patterns of climate change. We show how WR values can be used to translate east African rainfall declines into estimates of crop and rangeland water deficits. We also show that increases in WR, during recent droughts, has intensified aridity in arid regions. In addition, using the PWB, we also show that precipitation increases in humid areas of western east Africa have been producing increasingly frequent excessive rainfall seasons. The second portion of our paper focuses on assessing temporal outcomes for a fixed location (Kenya) to support drought-management scenario development. Kenyan rainfall is decreasing and population is increasing. How can we translate this data into actionable information? The United Nations and World Meteorological Organization advise nations to proactively plan for agro-hydrologic shocks by setting aside sufficient grain and financial resources to help buffer inevitable low-crop production years. We show how precipitation, WR, crop statistics, and population data can be used to help guide 1-in-10 and 1-in-25-year low crop yield scenarios, which could be used to guide Kenya's drought management planning and development. The first and second research components share a common objective: using the PWB to translate rainfall data into more actionable information that can inform disaster risk management and development planning.

Abstract Worldwide, cities are implementing circular economy (CE) strategies to reduce the resources they consume and their environmental impact. However, the evidence of the intended and unintended social consequences of the transition to “circular cities” is scattered. The lack of a coherent overview of the evidence on the subject can hinder effective decision-making in policy and practice. This study examines the extent to which the current literature addresses the social impacts that a transition to a CE produces in cities. We used a methodological approach related to systematic mapping to collate the evidence published over the past decade globally. The study finds that social impacts have rarely been considered in studies of circular cities, and where they have been discussed, the scope has been quite limited, only covering employment (mostly of informal sector workers) and governance practices. This scoping review highlights the need to further analyse and integrate social impact considerations into decision-making connected to transitions towards circular cities.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has faced a persistent fiscal deficit for the last three decades. In the vast literature, a question is still arising: is ASEAN’s fiscal deficit alarming? This study explores the fiscal deficit with different perspectives to provide guidelines for policymakers to answer this question. For this purpose, we offer fiscal causal hypotheses estimates, including the contribution of Government expenditures (GEs) and Government revenues (GRs) towards sustainable economic growth; we then evaluated two additional deficit hypotheses, the impact of fiscal deficit and deficit financing on inflation. This empirical analysis covered annual financial data for the years 1990 to 2019 of ten member countries of ASEAN by applying panel econometric techniques, which include unit root Levin, Lin, and Chu (LLC) and Im, Pesaran, and Shin (IPS) tests; the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model for cointegration; and the Dumitrescu–Hurlin (DH) test for causality. The findings revealed that government expenditures contribute more towards sustainable economic growth while government revenues are inversely related to growth in the long run. The DH causality test supported the fiscal synchronization hypothesis and current account targeting hypothesis in ASEAN. The interest rate is found as a moderator between fiscal and current account deficits. Furthermore, the findings showed that the fiscal deficit of ASEAN could generate inflation while relying on outstanding debt. Overall, our findings concluded that the fiscal deficit of ASEAN is alarming based on the behavior of government revenues, interest rate dynamics, political stability, and outstanding debt in deficit financing.

Climate plays an important role in human health and it is well established that climate change can have very significant impacts in this regard. In partnership with The Lancet and the MJA, we present the inaugural Australian Countdown assessment of progress on climate change and health. This comprehensive assessment examines 41 indicators across five broad sections: climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerability; adaptation, planning and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; economics and finance; and public and political engagement. These indicators and the methods used for each are largely consistent with those of the Lancet Countdown global assessment published in October 2017, but with an Australian focus. Significant developments include the addition of a new indicator on mental health. Overall, we find that Australia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on health, and that policy inaction in this regard threatens Australian lives. In a number of respects, Australia has gone backwards and now lags behind other high income countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. Examples include the persistence of a very high carbon-intensive energy system in Australia, and its slow transition to renewables and low carbon electricity generation. However, we also find some examples of good progress, such as heatwave response planning. Given the overall poor state of progress on climate change and health in Australia, this country now has an enormous opportunity to take action and protect human health and lives. Australia has the technical knowhow and intellect to do this, and our annual updates of this assessment will track Australia's engagement with and progress on this vitally important issue.