Jonathan Phillips and Victoria Plutshack co-authored a new report "Lessons for Modernizing Energy Access Finance, Part 2 – Balancing Competition and Subsidy: Assessing Mini-Grid Incentive Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa" reviewing 20 mini-grid incentive programs in sub-Saharan Africa, 17 of which are still being implemented. A new blog post at Brookings summarizes their findings.

COVID-19 has led to the postponement of next month’s international climate talks at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to November 2021. In a post for the Brookings Institution's Future Development blog, Victoria Plutshack and four co-authors look at Chile’s ambitious voluntary coal retirement scheme as an example of how informal conversations between international stakeholders at COPs can become leverage for policy change at home.

As revenue-starved utilities and governments search for places to save money in the pandemic-induced recession, investments in things like maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, and improved metering technology are getting shelved. Yet these are essential tools of utilities to increase reliability, reduce losses, and shift the culture of bill non-payment that has made the power sector Africa’s Achilles heel and slowed development for decades, write Jonathan Phillips, Robyn Meeks, and Victoria Plutshack.

A new report from Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions examines effective strategies to engage America’s farmers, ranchers and forestry stakeholders who are vital to solving climate change, reports BioCycle.

America’s farms, ranches and forests are vital to addressing climate change, but rural voters tend to view federal environmental policy with skepticism. A new Nicholas Institute report outlines a series of natural climate solution policy ideas aimed at investing in rural communities in a way that earns their political support.

In a new policy brief, Duke University's Energy Access Project, in collaboration with the Energy Access team at CrossBoundary Group, looked at the experiences of seven countries that have made great strides in bringing electricity to their rural populations: Brazil, Chile, Laos, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, and Tunisia. Despite widely different circumstances and initial electrification rates, there are important similarities.