Residents of informal settlements often bear the brunt of extreme weather and associated flooding. This guide is intended to strengthen participatory risk assessment capabilities for a wide range of municipal and development professionals and practitioners. It is also relevant to professionals involved in housing, social development, health, adult education, CBOs and NGOs. Although it was originally produced to help develop the resilience of residents in most vulnerable areas of the Western Cape, South Africa, it contains valuable lessons for other contexts.

The second edition of the WISIONS publication ‘Sustainble Energy for Poverty Reduction’ describes a range of projects that contribute to this end. One is the community-based adaptation project Solar Pintadas.
The aim of this project is to support rural development and entrepreneurship by increasing agricultural production through an efficient irrigation system driven by renewable energy. The project achieves this by using photovoltaic and biodiesel water pumps to improve local irrigation systems.

This report from the siyam’kela project looks at three focus areas that play a crucial role in stigma mitigation. The first section looks at how faith-based organisations (FBOs) are influential in shaping values and attitudes to vulnerable people in society as well as developing compassionate responses to social challenges. The second section explores how government departments, as employers and providers for services, can model policies and programmes around HIV/AIDS stigma.

A global benchmarking of policy instruments for effective climate change mitigation demonstrates the need for a mix of policy measures. The optimal policy package is characterised by the complementarity of its policy components, and the recognition of context: the appropriateness of the mix of measures varies from country to country depending on unique sets of climate change challenges as well as other national objectives.