September and October have been busy months for CDKN, seeing the launch of three funding calls and a strong showing from CDKN staff at many regional and international events.

The global research funding call was picked up far and wide, with applications streaming in before the closing date on 24 October.  Our Innovation Fund also opened last month, inviting applications in the first round for innovative projects on climate compatible development.  And CDKN held a funding call for collaboration between knowledge brokers, which closed on 3 October.  Successful projects will be announced soon.

CDKN CEO, Sam Bickersteth, and Executive Chairman, Simon Maxwell, were both at the Chatham House climate change conference on 10 and 11 October, and blogged about the lively debates they took part in.  Further afield, CDKN’s Head of Negotiations Support, Tim Ash-Vie, reported from negotiations in Panama, and Simon reported back from the Green Growth Leaders conference in Copenhagen.

In September we unveiled a major new tool to assist development planning decision-makers in a changing climate.  The Climate Planning users’ guide was created by Ecofys and IDS, with support from CDKN, and has already received some excellent feedback:

The tool was also endorsed as a good example of how to make a potentially dizzying number of tools easily accessible to users.

IIED announced the Climate Change Media Partnership fellows for 2011, who will spend two weeks at CoP-17 in Durban to report on the negotiations and receive training.  The partnership, which is sponsored by CDKN, addresses a resource gap which would leave some countries with no journalistic representation at the summit.

Another CDKN-sponsored project also went live, the Development and Climate Days International Film Competition.  Coordinated by IIED, the competition calls for entries on resilience to climate change.  Selected entries will be screened at the D&C conference at CoP-17 in December, where the judging panel will include CDKN’s very own film-maker, Fayyaz Ahmed Khan.  Films are a powerful tool in communicating climate and development issues, and CDKN was delighted to be able to share some of our own videos with Ecosystems Marketplace.

For the UN international day for disaster reduction, CDKN ran two blogs by guest writers: Maggie Ibrahim, from Practical Action UK’s Reducing Vulnerability programme, and Dr. Tom Mitchell, head of climate change at ODI, one of CDKN’s alliance partners.  Writing about district-level government and reducing the impact of climate-related disasters on children respectively, the blogs also appeared on Prevention Web and the ODI site.

Image: Web Refractions, courtesy of Evan Leeson