Environmental Action and the Impacts of Climate Change

Dhaka's Kallyanpur Canal used to be a symbol of everything broken about the city-flooded streets, floating plastic, and forgotten people. During every monsoon, the canal overflowed, carrying not just waste but the weight of neglect.
The UNOPS PLEASE Project-Plastic-Free Rivers and Seas for South Asia-**set out to change that story. Led by RedOrange in partnership with Dhaka North City Corporation, it combined a simple engineering idea-a floating barrier-with a human one: communication. Using its 5-for-1 SBCC model, every technical solution sparked five layers of change-community mobilization, youth leadership, storytelling, media engagement, and policy dialogue.
Waste workers, women, and young people became the heart of the transformation. They spoke for the canal, organized cleanups, shared stories, and built new norms around waste and dignity. Within months, the barrier intercepted 150 tons of plastic; dumping dropped 30% (drone verified 12%), waste segregation increased 18%, and awareness of plastic harm grew 48%.
What began as an environmental project became a movement for planetary health. It proved that communication can build systems, not just awareness-and that when people see themselves in the solution, behavior becomes belief. The Kallyanpur story is more than a clean canal; it's a glimpse of how cities can heal when everyone has a voice.

As extreme weather events increase in both frequency and intensity, the need for preparedness has never been more critical. Weather and Climate Information Services play a vital role in providing timely information to help communities prepare, respond, and adapt to changing conditions. 
This mixed-methods research engaged over 7,000 people across Bangladesh, Kenya, and Nepal. It assessed experiences of extreme weather events, and the uptake and barriers to adapting to changing weather patterns. As well as people's access and perceptions of weather services.
The research reveals that people across all three countries do not feel adequately informed or prepared to respond to climate-related challenges, as reflected in the low uptake of adaptive measures. For instance, only about two in ten farmers in Nepal and Bangladesh, and three in ten in Kenya, have changed their agricultural practices. Barriers extend beyond lack of support and resources. Competing priorities, fear of adopting new practices, and fatalistic attitudes, also hinder actions.
It was found that people do not check weather forecasts often partly because they do not trust them, they find them unreliable, lacking local data, and difficult to understand. 
The research showed that women are facing greater vulnerability to the impacts of extreme weather events and are also less likely than men to access and receive weather information. 
These findings underscore the importance of recommending evidence-based, simple, low-cost measures to encourage action; building trust in weather services to increase access; and addressing gender disparities to ensure women equally benefit from services.

The landfall of Cyclone Idai in Sofala province severely disrupted key determinants of nutrition (access to food, clean water, sanitation, and health services) leading to a sharp increase in undernutrition rates. Child undernutrition, particularly stunting, emerged as the most significant public health challenge in the affected areas.
In response and with the aim of addressing the underlying factors leading to high stunting rates, UNICEF Mozambique (MCO) designed and implemented a European Union-funded programme between 2021 and 2025 to strengthen convergent service delivery of health, nutrition and WASH services in six cyclone-affected districts of Sofala province.
This integrated programme focused on improved governance systems for multissectoral coordination, quality service delivery for community health, nutrition and WASH and a strong Social and Behavior Change (SBC) component delivered through Government-led platforms at community level:
Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)Model Family ProgrammeNutritional Interventions Package (PIN) Drawing on key results and lessons from previous stunting reduction efforts, UNICEF prioritized the geo-convergence of these SBC interventions in remote communities most affected by climate-related disasters.
An impact evaluation, using a combination of quasi-experimental and natural experiment methods, revealed that exposure to the geo-converged SBC package led to a significant reduction in severe stunting (−35%) and respiratory infections (−41%). [FB1][FB2]These findings, validated through sensitivity analyses, highlight the potential multiplier effect of integrated, community-based strategies in tackling malnutrition.
Building on these positive results, UNICEF MCO systematically expanded the geographic scope of the SBC package and established it as a model for addressing stunting across Mozambique.