How can we make climate change adaptation measures more effective? I recently traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to discuss ways to address that very question.

I took part in the 7th annual Community-Based Adaptation Conference (CBA7), hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Bangladesh Center for International Studies. The conference provides a forum for organizations working on climate change adaptation to come together, learn from each other, and identify shared interests and needs. The organizations involved mainly work at the grassroots level with poor and vulnerable people in the developing world, but the conference also attracts a growing number of government representatives.

One of the conference’s main themes was that stakeholders at the local and national levels must work together to foster locally grounded, community-based adaptation efforts. I elaborated on this theme in a video interview with IIED. Check it out below.

I recently had a frustrating experience. It all started during a casual conversation with one of my mother’s friends. After hearing a bit about my role as CFO of the World Resources Institute, my mother’s friend informed me that she regularly contributes to charities. In fact, she stated proudly, she only donates to organizations with “low overhead”– that is, to groups that spend the lion’s share of their funding on program expenses and only a small amount on fundraising and administrative costs. I couldn’t help but shake my head–not only because I disagreed with her, but because it’s a sentiment we hear all too often in the non-profit world.

Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta articulated this problem well in his March TED Talk, “The way we think about charity is dead wrong.” Pallotta explained that there are separate rulebooks for for-profit and non-profit companies in the United States. For-profits are judged on their growth and the quality of their products—which have the cost of necessary infrastructure or overhead baked into the cost of each product. Non-profits are evaluated on how little they invest in infrastructure rather than the quality of their work.

At WRI–and at all non-profits, for that matter–scrimping on essential infrastructure is short-sighted. This practice negatively impacts our work, our growth, and ultimately, our ability to change the world.

Stacy Kotorac, a project coordinator/research assistant with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, also contributed to this blog post.

Low-carbon city development has become a central part of the Malaysian government’s strategy to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) commitments. The country, currently ranked second in terms of emissions per capita in Southeast Asia, has committed to reduce the emissions intensity of its gross domestic product (GDP) by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Many Malaysian cities have created ambitious, low-carbon visions in order to meet national targets. However, many cities don’t yet have a credible GHG inventory or a comprehensive blueprint to help them systematically implement and monitor low-carbon actions. Without such a framework, it is nearly impossible to establish baseline measurements, set goals, or measure progress.

That’s why the GHG Protocol is currently working with partners to develop a standard methodology, the Global Protocol for Community Scale Emissions (GPC), as well as an accompanying toolkit that cities will be able to utilize to plan for their low-carbon development. Last year, we released the GPC Pilot Version 1.0. Over the next six months, about 30 cities will pilot test it.

Within our lifetimes, the world could be free of widespread, extreme poverty, replaced instead with shared prosperity and environmental and fiscal balance. That was the vision World Bank President Jim Yong Kim outlined at his first Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C. last week.

In a period of economic uncertainty, social exclusion, and climate and environmental crises, these goals hold immense promise. At the same time, for an institution already grappling with its redefined role in the coming decades, the Bank’s current capacity to support this vision will be tested.

The Common Vision for the World Bank Group that was approved by the World Bank’s Development Committee on April 20th includes two goals the Bank will work towards:

• alleviating extreme poverty by dropping the percentage of people living on less than U.S.$ 1.25 a day to 3 percent by 2030, and

• promoting shared prosperity by fostering income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every country

These two core goals are supplemented by the Bank’s understanding that they cannot be achieved without credible action to ensure environmental sustainability, especially on climate change.