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Announcing NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2025: Vote for Your Favorites by Jan. 4
NextBillion’s “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest has been an annual tradition since 2012. As we do each December, we’ve highlighted 12 of our most-read articles from the past year: You can find links to them in this article, or on the homepage below. We invite you to read them and vote for the ones that influenced your thinking the most. You can vote up to once per hour between today (Dec. 19) and 11:59 pm EST on Jan. 4. We thank you for your support and engagement over these past 20 years, and we wish you a happy and prosperous 2026.
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- Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
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Global Heat Wave Days Jump to 19.3 a Year: Women in Low- and Middle-Income Nations at High Risk
A review conducted by researchers from The George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London has found that most heat adaptation efforts in LMICs continue to focus on infrastructure and climate mitigation, with limited attention to health outcomes and significant gaps in gender inclusion.
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- Environment, Health Care
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Green Innovation Fund Backs Green Teams to Tackle Air Pollution in Indonesia
By ensuring every measurement is accurate and reliable, the company turns complex environmental data into actionable insights, supporting smarter decisions that protect public health and reduce the economic costs of pollution.
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- Environment
- Region
- South Asia
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African Development Bank Backs Hyphen with $10 Million Green Hydrogen Project in Namibia
The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA) will provide the loan to support front-end engineering design studies for solar and wind generation, battery energy storage systems, electrolyser capacity and desalination infrastructure.
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- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Global Chocolate Supply Chains Exposed to Cocoa-Driven Deforestation in Liberia
The investigation also notes that no cocoa farms in Liberia are certified by the Rainforest Alliance, despite all the named traders claiming to use the scheme. Global Witness said this gap underscores the limitations of voluntary sustainability labels.
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- Agriculture, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- forests, regulations, supply chains
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African Agriculture at a Climate Crossroads: Business Risks and Opportunities as the Continent Navigates the Growing Crisis
Africa’s food systems are under mounting pressure from climate change, as droughts, erratic rainfall, floods and heat waves increasingly undermine both crop and livestock production. But as Asamoah Oppong Zadok at Sustaina Harvest explains, despite the emergence of climate-smart innovations and resilience-focused initiatives, many stakeholders still prioritize short-term fixes and reactive crisis spending that leave deeper vulnerabilities intact. He argues that African agriculture faces a choice: remain trapped in a cycle of repeated shocks and emergency responses — or invest in technologies, ecosystems and people that can turn climate risk into opportunity, building healthy ecosystems and inclusive livelihoods over the long term.
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- Agriculture, Environment
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Context Instead of Carbon: Why Climate Finance in Africa Must Shift its Focus from Mitigation to Adaptation
Global climate action has long been framed through a binary lens: either mitigation or adaptation. As Sheena Raikundalia at Kuza One explains, this framework shapes how funding flows, how projects are designed and even how “success” is measured: Mitigation attracts the bulk of funding because it produces measurable carbon outcomes and enables high-emitting countries to meet their net-zero targets, while adaptation's local benefits are harder to quantify, commodify or sell. She argues that this imbalance risks turning African landscapes into carbon farms for the Global North, and also obscures the fact that many of Africa’s most climate-smart solutions could be promising investments — if the current financing architecture would support them. NOTE: In celebration of our 20th anniversary, NextBillion is highlighting key guest articles from our two decades online. We’re currently focusing on the healthcare sector: You can read these featured articles below.
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- Agriculture, Environment, Investing
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Clean Cooling Collaborative Receives $30 Million Gift to Expand Access to Efficient, Climate-Friendly Cooling
By making cooling solutions more sustainable — and expanding access to them — we can protect people and the planet.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
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