Blog
Bringing Innovation to the Conservation of Indonesia’s Peatlands
April 30, 2020
Winrock International is helping restore Indonesia’s peatland in a way that will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, slow land subsidence, combat the threat of fire, and support the tens of thousands of people who live and work there. I recently returned from a trip to Indonesia, where obstacles — and opportunities — are both in full […]
A More Just Vision
April 24, 2020
If you have ever been part of designing and implementing a large event you will recognize the need to start well in advance. In our case we started planning the Wallace Center’s fifth National Good Food Network (NGFN) conference — an important biannual networking and programming event — 18 months ahead of time. We lined […]
A CLEAN Getaway
March 30, 2020
In the weeks leading up to my trip last month to work onsite with the USDA-funded Creating Linkages for Expanded Agricultural Network (CLEAN) in Laos, the pandemic that has now interrupted daily life in many parts of the world had not yet reached its current proportions. It was my first scheduled trip to support a […]
Women and Climate Leadership
February 10, 2020
On U.N.’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, February 11, Winrock salutes all the girls and women our projects educate and empower — as well as the female scientists on our staff, who use their talents to help societies thrive. Last year I was selected to join the fourth cohort of Homeward Bound, […]
Fighting Wetland Loss Through Sustainable Development
January 30, 2020
On February 2, 1971, representatives from a handful of countries gathered in the small Iranian city of Ramsar on the Caspian Sea. Their historic mandate — to sign the first modern agreement between governments to preserve natural resources — built upon a decade of negotiations by environmentalists concerned by […]
Helping Vietnam Track its PFES Impacts
December 20, 2019
Since 2012, the USAID Vietnam Forests and Deltas program (VFD) has been helping the Government of Vietnam develop and operationalize a national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) program that has already directed over USD $500 million to forest owners as financial compensation for maintaining forest cover. For example, Vietnam’s hydroelectric power plants now reward […]
On the Frontlines of Climate Change
December 9, 2019
Bangladesh regularly tops the list of countries most heavily affected by global climate change. With over half the U.S. population in a country the size of New York state, its vulnerability is compounded by low-lying, flood-plain geography, limited infrastructure and high exposure to natural disasters and extreme weather. The day I landed in Dhaka, the […]
What’s in a Game?
November 13, 2019
This article was originally published in USAID’s Climatelinks. In Ghana, a changing climate is affecting the production of cocoa, one of the country’s major cash crops and its second leading foreign exchange earner. USAID and Winrock International worked together to produce ECO Game: Northern Ghana to provide communities with a […]
Encouraging Climate Optimism in Peru
November 6, 2019
“Between 1962 and 2016, Peru lost over 54 percent of its total glacial area.” “More intense rain events are expected, especially during El Niño years, increasing the risks of floods and landslides.” These were among the sobering facts about climate change that my team and I presented during workshops we delivered on behalf of the U.S. […]
Changing the Face of Clean Water Supply in Tanzania
October 17, 2019
It’s Friday morning in Hembeti, a rural village in eastern Tanzania, and Irene Lemelo is hard at work. Members of the local community update her on their progress digging trenches for water pipes, and Lemelo answers their questions about a gravity-fed water system now under construction. When she finished her engineering degree a year ago, […]