The Centre for a Smart Future partnered with the Blue Resources Trust on a research and advocacy project to advance innovating financing for sustainable marine conservation in Sri Lanka. We are announcing the launch of a set of knowledge materials, findings reports, and easy guides for interested stakeholders, freely available for download, developed under this project.

Colombo Urban Lab’s fourth policy brief on the impact of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis on the city's working class poor communities focusses on energy, education and health. These findings are from our ongoing qualitative research with communities in Colombo as well as a household survey conducted in April 2024 with thirty households in a settlement in North Colombo.

Mapping food vendors is an important method to capture availability, accessibility and diversity of food environments. This report details the methodology used to map food vendors in urban sites and explores the reasons behind the development of this methodology. It provides practical insights into the implementation of field-based vendor mapping, discussing both the challenges encountered and the lessons learned.

Beach cleanups, tree planting programmes, and commitments to recycling. These are some of the common ways in which Sri Lankan financial institutions typically market World Environment Day, falling each year on the 5th of June. Yet, there are major outstanding questions as to whether the country's financial institutions are effectively orienting themselves to meet the environmental challenges emerging in the country, and ensure that capital flows in the direction needed to foster a nature-positive economic recovery for Sri Lanka. New research by CSF shows that Sri Lankan financial institutions have some way to go in demonstrating environmental integration in their business.

A new publication by CSF explores the proliferation of algorithms in platform-based gig work, and draws on field research from Sri Lanka on implications for gig workers in the delivery and ride-hailing occupations. The publication titled, 'Algorithms at Work: The Management of Gig Work in Sri Lanka' by Anisha Gooneratne, is part of CSF's thematic pillar on Inclusive Technology and Innovation.

This infographic provides an overview of the sustainability of neighbourhoods in Colombo. A total of 1,360 settlements in the Colombo Municipality were surveyed in 2023, using 27 indicators for physical infrastructure, tenure and socio-economic conditions, to assess sustainability of neighbourhoods. The findings showed that settlements cannot be characterised as underserved settlements as they have adequate infrastructure provisioning.