Research news - Global Research and Technology Development

What works for urban resilience? Turning local evidence into action in 5 cities

Two women testing water samples in the open air, not in a lab

The Unlocking Resilience through Bottom-up Action-Research and Multi-Scalar Networks (URBAN) project tested how locally led climate adaptation and political-economy analysis can move from evidence into planning, resources and policy influence.

Unlocking the potential of flow batteries in developing economies

Flow Batteries are electrochemical devices that store electrical energy in liquid electrolytes and convert it back to electricity when needed. In 2025, the Faraday Institution commissioned a study to assess the performance of different flow battery technologies and evaluated their potential contribution to clean energy transitions in emerging economies.

Introducing OASIS: an open home for AI in international development

3 boxes of text which describe 3 of the tools in the OASIS toolkit: Evalexplorer, which unlocks insights from thousands of evaluation reports that currently sit unused across the sector, DevExplorer, AI assisted analysis across the IATI dataset of development and humanitarian programmes and Transport Global Intelligence System, a new tool in development to help teams map and analyse transport sector signals from across the globe.

The Frontier Tech Hub is launching OASIS: a shared, open platform for AI in development. It’s a place to find tools other people have built, discuss what’s working, and build on it rather than starting again.

Beyond the Axis: the evolution of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’

Beyond the Axis is part of the Cross-border Conflict Evidence Policy and Trends (XCEPT) programme. The project set out to understand how Iranian arms transfers to allied groups has changed over time, and was ultimately able to explain how and why Iran, and its ‘Axis of Resistance’ allies have proven more resilient than expected in the wake of the regional crises since October 2023.

Delivering clean energy access at scale through innovation

Two pictures, the one on the left shows a battery charging hub, the one on the right shows a man putting a battery into an electric motorbike

TEA is the flagship FCDO research and innovation platform supporting early-stage testing and scale up of innovative clean energy technologies and business models in developing countries, targeting the 655 million people still without access to electricity.