Climate-smart, climate-resilient, climate-compatible development - call it what you will. These days, it's received wisdom in the aid sector that extreme weather and longer-term climate shifts are hitting the poor hard and things are likely to get worse as global warming heats up the planet. Many agencies now plan their work with at least an eye on the weather and climate hazards forecast for the coming months and years and how that could affect their programmes and the people they're helping. A growing number of projects aim to equip local communities with tools and knowledge to cope with increasingly adverse meteorological conditions.

"Even if globally the poverty rate is reduced by half by 2015, as the latest United Nations progress report on the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] suggests, about one billion people will still be mired in extreme poverty by 2015. ... The report argues that current approaches to poverty often ignore its root causes, and consequently do not follow through the causal sequence. Rather, they focus on measuring things that people lack to the detriment of understanding why they lack them." - UNRISD Report on Combating Poverty and Inequality, September 2010

Civil society is calling for an end to impunity for the harassment of human rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The renewed call comes as an activist kidnapped at the end of August have described their detention and torture by uniformed captors. Bwira Kyahi, president of civil society in Masisi, a town in the province of North Kivu, and another human rights advocate, Balisi Kapumba, who works as an organizer with the NGO Solidarity Action for Peace and Development, were kidnapped during the last week of August in Goma. Kyahi was found Aug. 30, 2010.