PHYS: Few members of the UK public are comfortable with the idea of injecting aerosols high into the atmosphere to help slow down climate change, a study has found. People voiced concerns that this type of approach fails to address the basic problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. They are also nervous about any unintended

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RTCC: The world’s largest cities are feeling the effects of climate change and are leading efforts to adapt to them. That is according to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group that includes London, New York, Cairo and Sao Paulo. Terri Wills, director of global initiatives at C40, told RTCC that the group has had to

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ABC News: Climate changes and rising carbon dioxide levels don’t just affect the environment. Experts say they also affect your nose. Warmer temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels mean certain plants will thrive, and those are the plants that tend to make us sneeze during allergy season. Allergies may seem like a minor nuisance, but

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Guardian: Global warming has not stalled, insists world’s best-known climate scientist. Prof James Hansen warns public not to be fooled by ‘diversionary tactic’ from deniers. from “deniers” who want the public to be confused over climate change, according to the world’s best-known climate scientist. Prof James Hansen, who first alerted the world to climate change

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EJNet: The most comprehensive survey of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming ever done reveals a 97.1 per cent consensus. The research team surveyed the abstracts of over 12,000 scientific articles published between 1991 and 2011 on the subjects of “global climate change” or “global warming” to see to what extent they endorsed or

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Science Alert: Ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades, a new international study has found, driving up the proportion of warm-water fish being caught and posing a threat to food security worldwide. The new study, conducted by researchers from the University of Tasmania’s specialist Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

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Scidev.net: Nepal is looking at waste-to-energy (WtE) technologies to address its huge energy deficit and also manage growing urban and industrial waste. Half of Nepal’s households are off the national grid while supply shortfalls and interrupted power cause industries losses worth 60 billion Nepali rupees (US$ 700 million) annually. Last month (26 April), the ‘Waste-to-Energy

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Neoclassical realism and international climate change politics: moral imperative and political constraint in international climate finance. In this article, I present a neoclassical realist theory of climate change politics that challenges the idea that cooperation on climate change is compelled alone by shared norms and interests emanating from the international level and questions if instead

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Himalayan Times: Climate change has always remained as one of the hot topics of discussion amongst the environmentalists, governments, policymakers as well as other bodies concerned. As per Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increase in global average air and ocean

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Thomson Reuters Foundation: Plans to protect ecosystems and help people adapt to climate change ― also known as ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) ― must involve vulnerable groups, including women and communities greatly hit by global warming if they are to succeed, according to scientists who met in Tanzania last month (21-23 March). Scientists and policymakers at the UN-ledinternational

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From local knowledge to national policy: how can China’s mountain communities better adapt to climate change? Faced with increasing rainfall variability – especially continuous, four-year droughts – mountain farmers in Southwest China’s Yunnan province have developed innovative strategies to minimize water-related threats to their livelihoods. Yufang Su, Jianchu Xu and a team of World Agroforestry

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World Bank: Climate Change Cutting Crop Production in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by over 25 Percent unless Action Is Taken Now. In parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, climate change is poised to hamper food production and curb rural incomes over the next decades unless farmers get the help they need through improved

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ACT Alliance members from eight Asian countries met last week in Nepal to share their experiences and develop strategies on how to better influence governments to address climate change. Some of the countries that suffer the most visible and tangible immediate effects of climate change are located in Asia. Foezullah from ACT Bangladesh explains that

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Tribune: “We have suggested building several upstream water reservoirs in Pakistan to prevent floods. We are also examining reforestation as it slows down the process of floods and subsequent droughts,” Marius Keller, an adaptation consultant with the International Institute of Sustainable Development, said speaking to Lahore University of Management Sciences students on Monday. Keller presented

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Nature: Dengue is a systemic viral infection transmitted between humans by Aedes mosquitoes1. For some patients, dengue is a life-threatening illness2. There are currently no licensed vaccines or specific therapeutics, and substantial vector control efforts have not stopped its rapid emergence and global spread3. The contemporary worldwide distribution of the risk of dengue virus infection4

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WRI: Indian cities are urbanizing at an unprecedented scale and pace. Over the next few decades, India’s urban population is expected to increase significantly, from 377 million in 2011 to 590 million by 2030. The problem is that the country’s existing urban transport infrastructure is already over-capacity. This fact–coupled with the alarmingly high rate of

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CNN: Climate change is responsible for more than half the changes detected in the world’s vegetation, researchers say, and human activities for only about a third. The amount of vegetation in the world, and the way it is spread across the planet, has changed significantly in the last three decades, researchers say. They attribute more

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HT: Voicing his concern on “painfully slow” progress in climate talks, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hit at rich nations for not doing enough to fight climate change. Singh, while inaugurating the Fourth Clean Energy Ministerial, also made it clear that rich nations, who were responsible for a bulk of global warming causing greenhouse gas emissions,

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IIED: The poorest communities (and poorest countries) are leading the world in learning about and practising adaptation to climate change. The rich would do well to learn from them. The flood plain of the Ganges river in southern Bangladesh is only around two metres higher than sea level. Rising floodwaters can wipe out crops and

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C4D: Climate change is increasingly intersecting with the challenges faced by people seeking to emerge from poverty, and changing the way Canadian development organizations – and their partners in the global south – must design their programs to ensure resiliency and continued sustainability. Climate change not only permeates the entire development process, it threatens many

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NRDC: I found it quite interesting that an Indian city should have a proper ‘action plan’ to tackle the effects of changing climate patterns that have resulted in some severe summer temperatures in the last decade. Living in India, the action plans by city or state administrations we have mostly seen are: close schools and

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Scidev.net: Scientists in Saudi Arabia say that by the end of 2050 parts of the country will be hotter and have reduced precipitation, which could affect agricultural productivity. The work was published in February’s issue of the Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering. [1] It predicts that average temperatures in Saudi Arabia could increase by

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World Bank: Looking Beyond the Horizon: How Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Responses Will Reshape Agriculture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Food security remains a key development challenge across the globe, with some projections estimating the need for an increase in agricultural production of 70-100 percent by 2050. Shifts in temperature and precipitation are

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weAdapt: Climate change vulnerability and adaptation planning can be taken into consideration across many sectors and at different levels and scales. Different scales of planning have different contexts and may require different approaches. In a landscape context, inter-linkages between sectors within the landscape form the context of adaptation planning, as the response of any one sector may have consequences

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A new output report from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has been published which is an outcome of an international workshop on “Scaling up Climate Services for Farmers in Africa and South Asia,”.  Jointly with USAID, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Climate Services Partnership (CSP), CCAFS

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EBA: The government of Nepal, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) jointly launched the ‘Ecosystem based Adaptation in mountain ecosystem in Nepal (EbA)’ Project on the 16th August 2012. The project aims at implementing an emerging approach to help people to adapt to

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Life had been good for Sunyali Majhi, a farmer in Dolalghat, a small village about 50 kilometres from landlocked Nepal’s Kathmandu. She harvested enough rice to sell and feed her brood at home. But the portions have been getting smaller, the financial squeeze tighter. In the shade of a Peopaal tree, Sunyali and her children

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Environment Expert: More than 75% of the countries in Asia and the Pacific are experiencing a serious lack of water security, with many of them facing an imminent water crisis unless immediate steps are taken to improve management of water resources, says a new study prepared jointly by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Asia-Pacific

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CNN: The Group of Least Developed Countries, a key partner in the long-running United Nations climate talks, has told the Climate News Network it is willing to agree a core demand of the industrialised world on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. In what could be a far-reaching move, the world’s poorest countries say they are

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TERI: Recently the need for a greater understanding on linkages between biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation and the livelihoods of the local communities has increased the attention of the world leaders. The threat of climate change, which cuts across national and international boundaries, has further catalyzed the importance of the issues and facilitated

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DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream. In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity – the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels

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The Daily Beast: Welcome to a warmer, wilder world! We need to stop debating and start accepting that climate change is happening. Eugene Linden on how adaptation and market forces (hint: insurance companies) might temper the coming catastrophe. To paraphrase Hemingway, climate change first comes gradually and then all at once. Now that the negative

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The first Swiss development experts arrived in Peru half a century ago, beginning a fruitful and multifaceted partnership. In late 2011, SDC brought traditional bilateral cooperation to a close and transferred on-going projects to its local partners. In the future, Peru will actively participate in a number of SDC global programmes, particularly in the area

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Eldis: This paper analyses the connections between climate change impacts, ecosystem degradation and increased risk of climate-related disasters. It defines the central role of ecosystem management in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR) and assesses the challenges for enhanced ecosystem management for climate change adaptation and DRR. Given the increasing importance of ecosystem

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OneUNTSP: The National Council on Climate Change (DNPI) of the Government of Indonesia held a workshop on 14 February 2013 with over 62 participants representing 15 government ministries and agencies, 7 UN agencies (UNESCO, FAO, ILO, WHO, UNORCID, UNEP, UNITAR), the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) Office, 3 universities (University of Indonesia, University of Sriwijaya, Bandung

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This book provides a great overview of practical and early examples of actual adaptive actions already taking place across Europe. It provides detailed information on each identified measure: to which sector it belongs, (i.e. water safety, agriculture, cities), specific climate effects adapted to, length of the project and costs and benefits, including the proportion of

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Alertnet: Leading climate scientists in Pakistan have called for the development of high-temperature-tolerant, climate-resilient, genetically modified crops and the construction of huge water reservoirs to mitigate the effects of climate change. Speaking after the launch of Pakistan’s National Climate Change Policy (NCCP) last month, Ashfaq Ahmad Chattha warned that rising temperatures due to climate change

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GIZ: Adaptation to climate change is much about ‘doing things differently because of climate change’ (Bo Lim), or making the right decision in light of climate change. Adaptation has the ultimate goal of avoiding harm and costs that can arise from doing business as usual without taking climate change into consideration. It often tries to

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UN Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Helen Clark today launched UNDP’s 2013 Human Development Report, which charts the unprecedented rise of developing countries to create a new “global middle class.” “The development landscape is very different today from when the first Human Development Report was launched 23 years ago,” Helen Clark said, releasing UNDP’s 22nd flagship

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RawStory: The rise of developing nations has cut poverty while the combined economies of Brazil, China and India are on a path to overtake wealthy nations, but failure to act on climate change could reverse those gains, a UN report said Thursday. Developing nations are now driving economic growth, helping to lift hundreds of millions

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Tribune: Pakistan’s only dedicated climate change research centre is going to partner with Italian experts to identify climate change adaptation measures. The Global Change Impact Studies Centre (GCISC), which recently became an autonomous body by act of parliament, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ev-K2-CNR, an Italian research organisation that has worked in Pakistan’s

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Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter Earth’s climate system — such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space — has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But such efforts could present unforeseen new risks. That inherent tension, argue

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Reuters: While the climate change discussion in Washington is moving at a glacial pace, nature is responding to climate change at record speed. The animal, plant and insect kingdoms aren’t interested in public policy. They don’t read political blogs. They adapt because they have to. They must change to survive. We would be wise to

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Times of India: Non-life insurers are working on a catastrophic fund to provide relief to victims of natural calamities such as cyclone, floods, earthquake and tsunami. Insurers are in talks with the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and state governments to set up a fund that will take care of providing immediate relief to victims.

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4 Ways the Green Climate Fund Can Support “Readiness” for Climate Finance. Research shows that developing countries will need about $531 billion of additional investments in clean energy technologies each year in order to limit global temperature rise to 2° C above pre-industrial levels, thus preventing climate change’s worst impacts. While developed countries have pledged

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Himalayan Times: Climate change refers to any significant change in the measures of climate lasting for an extended period of time. It includes major changes in climatic parameters like temperature, precipitation, or wind patterns, among other effects, that occur over several decades or longer. The longevity of transportation infrastructure, the long-term nature of climate change,

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IPS: Drought has dramatically increased as a consequence of climate change. Most countries react to it only after it has occurred, but don’t have national policies to prevent it. The high-level meeting on national drought policies in Geneva this week is trying to match scientific knowledge with political awareness. “Drought is a natural phenomenon, but

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Nature: Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change. In the most extensive study

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Globalizationandhealth: China has experienced noticeable changes in climate over the past 100 years and the potential impact climate change has on transmission of mosquito-borne infectious diseases poses a risk to Chinese populations. The aims of this paper are to summarize what is known about the impact of climate change on the incidence and prevalence of

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IRIN: No one working in the aid community in recent years could have avoided the buzzword “resilience” – but what does the term mean practically, and how has it helped shape action on the ground? In fact, there is no standard definition of the term, points out a draft paper by the UN Development Programme

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PHYS.Org: Monitoring communities of climate sensitive species, such as insects, could enable scientists to develop indicators for climate change effects on biodiversity and help devise policies to protect it. With climate change, flora and fauna shift their seasonal inner clock. For example, fruit tree blossom earlier than previous years. But many species may not be

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The Voice of Russia: The increasing use of biofuel to help meet the UKs commitment to renewable energy – is being hotly debated. Members of the Department for Energy and Climate Change are considering whether to accept plans – for new subsidies to burn trees in British power plants. But some scientists believe renewable energy

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IRIN: When asked what resilience means, the head of city planning for the Philippines’ second largest city, Davao, said that for Filipinos it means how high floodwater reaches before they agree to be evacuated. “In our most recent flooding, that level was chest-high,” said Roberto Alabado III, referring to flooding in mid-January that affected thousands

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Guardian: Barack Obama should spread awareness of the “scientific realities of climate change” in the US, the head of the UN’s climate science panel has told the Guardian. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that one of the president’s priorities should be “awareness creation” on the public’s understanding of the

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PHYS.ORG: Plants can adapt to extreme shifts in water availability, such as drought and flooding, but their ability to withstand these extreme patterns will be tested by future climate change, according to a new study by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and UTS. The research, recently published in the prestigious journal Nature,

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CNN: If seeing really is believing, then James Balog’s film Chasing Ice is probably prompting a widespread outburst of faith. It shows the graphic evidence of how fast glaciers are melting worldwide. You’d have to worry about James Balog’s knees. He has an operation on one leg and then, for a bit of gentle recuperation,

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360 Yale: Renowned biologist George Schaller has been traveling to the Tibetan Plateau for nearly three decades, studying its unique wildlife. But with climate change and overgrazing taking a toll on the landscape, he reports, scientists and the Chinese government are working to preserve one of the planet’s wildest places. Chang Tang. It is a

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Huffingtonpost: WB President Jim Yong Kim’s recent Washington Post op-ed “Make Climate Change a Priority” warned that “global warming imperils all of the development gains we have made.” Jim Kim drew on a recent World Bank report that points to the possibility for global temperatures to rise by 4 degrees Celsius or more by the

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Guardian: Team of scientists use radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure historic melting rates. A global temperature rise of 1.5C would be enough to start the melting of permafrost in Siberia, scientists warned on Thursday. Any widespread thaw in Siberia’s permanently frozen ground could have severe consequences for climate change. Permafrost covers

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Times of India: Popular for its sweetness, apples produced in the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh are now gradually losing their taste and even turning sour as a result of climate change. With the weather becoming erratic and a clear variation in temperature, snowfall and rainfall pattern being recorded, apple crops are no more getting

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