This brief provides an analysis of the status of gender considerations at the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), an adaptation financing instrument under the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It gives some recommendations for incorporating gender equality in SCCF funded projects in order to improve their adaptation outcomes.

Publication Series on Ecology 8: Climate change has overwhelming repercussions for international food security and the right to adequate food. Changing weather patterns impact people’s ability to obtain access to sufficient food in many ways: expanding droughts affect crop yields, ocean acidification alters ecosystems and causes fish populations to decrease, and extreme weather conditions destroy entire ecosystems, including the food sources growing within.

This study highlights how the climate change regime and the human rights regime addressing the right to food have failed to coordinate their agendas and to collaborate to each other’s mutual benefit. It proposes concrete methods by which institutions can address climate change problems and realize the right to food symbiotically, in compliance with the principles of systemic integration under international law.

Publication Series on Democarcy 14: After 1989 in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus, two aspects played and still play a key role in determining whether a political system exhibits merely a democratic façade or a truly democratic constitution: civil society and political culture, on the one hand, and the influence of ethnic conflicts, on the other. This publication illuminates the successes and failures, the instruments and institutions, and the concepts behind two decades of external democracy promotion.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen between 7 and 18 December will be extremely critical in determining the global actions to curb climate change in the future. This issue of Perspectives covers some of the key issues and implications of the negotiations as they are viewed from (Southern) Africa.

Copenhagen must lead to a breakthrough. The industrial countries bear double responsibility: not only do they need to take reducing their own CO2 emissions seriously, they are also called upon for the substantial financial and technological transfers needed to put developing and newly industrialized countries onto low-carbon development paths.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bosnia-Herzegovina organized an international conference "1989-2009 Years of Upheaval: Beginning of Inclusion or Exclusion?". It dealt with the transition process from an authoritarian to a democratic state model, with the changes in society and politics.

The current automotive crisis is not merely the result of an economic downturn, but has revealed structural flaws within the industry itself. This strategy paper analyzes the current crisis and outlines a vision of the “mobility products of the future”.

It is mainly the inhabitants of the global South who suffer from the effects of climate change. This publication uses case examples to illustrate the dangers faced by indigenous peoples in particular, as well as the tools the UN human rights system gives them to support their struggle for just climate policies.

Eni, formerly the Italian state oil company, is undertaking a new multi-billion dollar investment in Congo in developing tar sands, oil palm for food and bio-diesel and gas-fuelled electricity. The study gives background information about the plans.