GAIN: The Annual Meeting & Scientific Convening of the Global Adaptation Institute (GAIN) centered on one theme – the urgent need to adapt to the changing global climate requires pragmatic solutions with the private sector leading the effort. GAIN Founding CEO Dr. Juan Jose Daboub, former Managing Director at the World Bank, noted that even five years ago, [...]

ATREE: The Himalayas are assumed to be undergoing rapid climate change, with serious environmental, social and economic consequences for more than two billion people. However, data on the extent of climate change or its impact on the region are meagre. Based on local knowledge, we report perceived changes in climate and consequences of such changes [...]

Business Standard: It must reduce poverty and increase prosperity – all while leaving a smaller carbon footprint Asia-Pacific is large, diverse and growing fast. It contains more than half of humanity, and 30 per cent of the global land mass. It has made great progress in reducing poverty. Yet, with two-thirds of the world’s poor, [...]

Scidevnet: The multi-billion dollar cassava industry of South–East Asia may already be suffering from multiple pest and disease outbreaks triggered by climate change, cassava researchers have told a conference in Bangkok. Although the crop can thrive in hotter and dryer conditions in the region, an increase in pests and diseases could easily wipe out recent [...]

Hill Post: Ignorance is not always bliss; not when the climate and pristine ecology is at stake. A change in the climate that has served millions of life forms from the beginning of time does not just affect our surroundings. It ropes in our future generations too. 2 years ago, I crossed the Rohtang Pass [...]

The News Pakistan: A Bangladeshi disaster management expert, Khurshid Alam, on Friday emphasised the need for training the local community in playing an effective role in recovering from natural calamities and minimising the adverse effects of an emergency. Local knowledge should be incorporated in designing a disaster management plan. It is very important to learn [...]

WRI Publication: This report introduces the National Adaptive Capacity (NAC) framework, a tool to help governments bring institutional capacity development into their adaptation planning processes. The NAC framework enables its users to systematically assess institutional strengths and weaknesses that may help or hinder adaptation. National adaptation plans may then be better designed to make best [...]

Institute of Hazard Risks and Resilience: Last week Archinect website carried a slightly intriguing design concept for ‘Landslide Mitigation Housing‘ by Jared Winchester and Viktor Ramos, which are residential units to be intentionally constructed on a landslide site.  The inspiration is a location in California at Rancho de Palos Verdes , near to Los Angeles, [...]

Canberratimes: Adapting to inevitable global warming will need changes across the Australian economy, including ditching property taxes that discourage people from moving out of areas prone to extreme weather events, the government’s independent research arm says. In a draft report released overnight, the Productivity Commission also calls for a close examination of federal disaster relief, [...]

CDKN [Sam Bickersteth, CEO]: The Government of Vietnam, IIED and BCAS (Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies) have just hosted the Sixth annual Community Based Adaptation (CBA) conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, 16-22 April. I participated, together with CDKN’s Asia Director, Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, many members of CDKN network and some 300 others from 61 countries: it [...]

Yale 360: With soaring human populations and rapid climate change putting unprecedented pressure on species, conservationists must look to innovative strategies — from creating migratory corridors to preserving biodiversity hotspots — if we are to prevent countless animals and plants from heading to extinction. By Lee Hannah Throughout much of the Pleistocene era, which began [...]

PHYS.ORG: Climate change will make conservation of biodiversity, and all the associated human benefits such as clean water and clean air, more challenging and expensive, with costs increasing by more than 100 percent in some cases, according to three new studies by a group of international researchers convened by Conservation International. Researchers called the studies [...]

Alertnet: Water is key to food security. Meeting mounting food needs of a burgeoning population increasingly depends on efficient use of the water. That is possible if people are educated about its prudent use. According to the a UN Water, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access [...]

IHDP (GEC): Shades of Green Global Perspectives on the Green Economy The capitalist system has since its emergence as a dominant economic model faced scrutiny and scepticism, which has in many parts of the world reached a zenith in the wake of a global economic crisis and after decades of environmental degradation. Some would consider [...]

Telegraph Nepal: The Nepalese Ministry of Environment launched the Nepal Climate Change Support Programme at the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change in Kathmandu, April 5, 2012. The first phase of this Euro 16.5 m (NRs 1,800,000,000)  programme aims to reduce the vulnerability of 2 million women and men in the Mid and [...]

BANGKOK—India, like other Asian countries, has focused its climate-change adaptation strategies on rural and urban areas while neglecting the urban fringes, say experts. Peri-urban areas are characterized by haphazard, accelerated expansion and are farthest from basic urban services and infrastructure, according to United Nations-Habitat’s “The State of Asian Cities 2010-11.” By 2020, of the projected [...]

SciDevnet: Durable food security and agricultural growth depend on development strategies with resilience built in from the start, says Gordon Conway. Economic growth with resilience to environmental threats will be central to the agenda of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June this year, which aims to map out a pathway of sustainable development [...]

The world’s poorest countries can jump directly from the pre-electricity era into a new industrial revolution through an “energy Internet” — the uptake of renewable energy shared through communication technologies, argues economist Jeremy Rifkin. “The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems”, writes Rifkin. And now — [...]

To develop an effective approach to climate change, don’t rely on public opinion polls; pay attention to those who are “voting with their feet” — the fish and wildlife that must adapt to or migrate from changing habitat or die, says guest columnist William Geer. SHOULD elected officials and policymakers let public-opinion polls decide our [...]

100 days to go to a conference and a summit that UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon has described as a “once in a life time opportunity”. Whether this event, coming 20 years after the historic Rio Earth Summit of 1992, delivers transformational change will depend on governments, but it also depends on you. If the UN [...]

Livestock production systems in Nepal are experiencing a significant downturn as critical resources such as water, soil, forests, agricultural productivity and farm labor are affected by rapid land use changes and climate change impacts. To ensure livestock climate change adaptation and strengthen livestock production systems, it is critical to understand and enhance feed, nutrition, and [...]

The World Bank Board of Executive Directors approved a US$300.75 million Development Policy Loan  to support the institutionalization of policies aimed at strengthening social resilience to extreme situations — in particular those caused by climate change — and overcoming them. According to the World Bank , to this end, it promotes State-level climate change action [...]

Nature: Melting glaciers contribute to sea-level rise, but measuring their mass loss over time is difficult. An analysis of satellite data on Earth’s changing gravity field does just that, and delivers some unexpected results. Glaciers and ice caps are pivotal features of both water resources and tourism. They are also a significant contributor to sea-level [...]

Practical Action Handbook from Nepal: This handbook is aimed at practitioners who seek examples of how the V2R framework can be used in practice, based on examples from Nepal. It offers a step process, workbooks and tools.  It includes guidance on how to include long-term trends in programming with a focus on climate change.  It [...]

Promoting resilience is a growing area of interest in development. The UK Government’s Humanitarian Policy ‘Saving Lives, preventing suffering and building resilience’, puts resilience at the heart of their approach. Building on this, DFID have committed to embedding resilience-building in all of its country programmes by 2015 and integrating resilience into all of their work [...]

Sudhirendar Sharma Tagged as fragile, remote and marginal, these three aspects have featured prominently in discussions and deliberations concerning development in the mountains in our part of the world. Retired but active academician N S Jodha, a former senior staff with the Kathmandu-based Integrated Center for International Mountain Development, has been credited for using these [...]

Guardian: Three years after it was decimated by cyclone Aila, Bainpara in south-west Bangladesh is being rebuilt with UK assistance. On 25 May 2009, the village of Bainpara, in the district of Khulna on Bangladesh’s south-west coast, was wiped off the map. Driven by the 120km/h winds of cyclone Aila, a 12ft wall of sea [...]

NewYork Times: Agriculture has long been a stepchild in global negotiations over the climate. Hopes had risen that this might change at the latest big global climate session, in Durban, South Africa, in December. It did not. Now, a group of experts led by John Beddington, the chief science adviser of the British government, is [...]

Washington Bangla Radio: Chairman of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Kumar Pachauri was in Kolkata on Jan 2, 2012 to attend a function. He shared his thoughts about India’s role in the global arena vis-a-vis the developing nations in combating climate change. IBNS correspondent Pratik Singh caught up with Pachauri for a brief [...]

The Interdependent: In the birthplace of the potato, things are heating up. Over the past decade, the Quechua farmers working at the El Parque de la Papa, outside Cusco, Peru, started noticing that the potato varieties they used to grow at lower altitudes can now only be cultivated much higher up the mountainside. “Temperate zones [...]

Telegraph Nepal: Combating global warming and achieving UN’s 2 degree Celsius goal by 2020 require collective political action of the rich and the poor nations. Without this, small, island and least developed countries like Nepal would remain vulnerable to climate changes causing droughts, floods, rise of sea level causing coastal tragedies, fast melting Himalayan ice, [...]

Green Conduct: The last COP in Durban ended in a success for the UNFCCC process, but has more nebulous implications for the climate itself, with Kyoto put on artificial respirator and a more comprehensive agreement being pushed back to a later date. The most significant progress at Durban for climate change adaptation came in the [...]

K N Vajpai: This UN conference on climate change (COP) remained a place where the people from around the world discuss, debate and come to a conclusion on various confronting issues our communities  face around the world on climate change. In this note I am  trying to discuss three important aspects of this conference on [...]

IPS (Durban): Negotiators at the 17th Conference of Parties owe it to the world’s more than seven billion people to deliver a deal with a work plan for agriculture, a sector that is expected to be the worst affected by climate change. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of Food Agriculture Natural Resources Policy Advocacy Network told [...]

Times of India: Ranjeni A Singh says that “go green” is a mantra being chanted by faith leaders across the world. This is evident from the growing environment-saving initiatives being taken up by religious and spiritual organisations, masters and seekers. In Durban, South Africa, representatives of governments, international organisations and civil society are brainstorming at [...]

It’s intrinsically scary: 7 billion people, growing to 9 billion. Can we feed them all? Already, obviously, we don’t. But climate change could make global food insecurity much, much worse. This week, coinciding with the opening of the United Nations’ climate talks in Durban, we’ve seen Oxfam warn that extreme weather threatens food security – [...]

Durban Post by Dr. C. S. Silori direct from United Nations Climate Change Conference at Durban 2011. “We don’t’ understand the message God has sent us…..”, this is how the mountain communities of Peru react to the recent signs of climate change they observe in their day to day life. There is enough to indicate [...]

Hindustan Times: The union cabinet on Thursday approved India’s tough stance on climate change issues despite rural development minister Jairam Ramesh cautioning against the country being seen as a “deal breaker” at the Durban climate talks. Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan had proposed at the cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that India should not [...]

The WeekEnd Leader: He made the glaciers move from the Himalayas and come closer home. By bringing glaciers to his village, Norphel Chewang helped Ladakh farmers till the land in summer – a privilege nature denied them. While Mahesh Bhatt captures the fabulous images in his camera, Anita Pratap catches up with the engineer. Chewang [...]

Soham Baba, leader of the Soham Baba Mission Foundation, says more efforts are needed to preserve nature than to destroy it. Speaking at the Inkosi Luthuli International Convention Centre, he stressed that climate change effects have drastically changed the livelihoods of the Himalayas. He vows to continue fighting on behalf of the indigenous people, saying [...]

Good Environment: This graph from the  Energy Information Administration communicates the reality of renewable energy in America better than any other single source. Renewable energy covers only a small slice, 8 percent, of the country’s needs. And despite the focus on biofuels and solar power, the chart shows that more than a third of that slice [...]

National Geographic: Google Earth Shows How Dams Could Worsen Climate Change. A project of two NGOs highlights far-ranging effects of damming rivers which is a new interactive Google Earth video tour aims to teach people how damming rivers around the world can exacerbate climate change. The video, created by the nonprofit conservation groups International Rivers [...]

OutReach: A new paper published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the support of the Government of Ireland, offers options to scale up climate action globally in Durban, Rio and beyond. The paper shows that there are far more options to counter climate change than acknowledged or [...]

DW-World.De: Despite the cooling effects of a La Nina event, 2011 is likely to end among the 10 hottest years on record, according to a World Meteorological Organization report released on the sidelines of climate talks in Durban. The past decade has been the hottest on record, according to a report released on the sidelines [...]

The Oxfam is taking the note through its campaign called ‘Hungry for action at the UN Climate Change Conference’. The campaigners say that when there is no food how people are going to survive on this planet, so we need to be aware of the facts and should take immediate actions towards adaptation and mitigation [...]

K N Vajpai: Writes on the expected outcomes from Durban Climate Change Conference (CoP 17)in terms of growing momentum of action and alarm bells from new researches. His discourse is about the meager role played by the leaders from most vulnerable regions like Himalayas and Andes during this important global conference.   With the representation [...]

Daily Times: Since 2006, the food insecure population in Pakistan has increased by 12 million while the number of the severely food insecure population (consuming less than 1,700 kcal per day) has risen by 9.6 million to 45.3 million people – 28 percent of the population. Two thirds of these new severely food insecure people [...]

Zee News: Global climate change and its profound implication on the biological system- is much more evident than ever before – the extreme weather conditions like scorching heat, floods, droughts, storms, epidemics, extinction of species validates the fact that climate change as a phenomenon can no more be ignored – and that, it’s because of [...]

Bhutan is a small fragile mountainous country situated in the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas. Its total land covers 38,394 sq km. The climate is strongly influenced by its topography with elevations ranging from about 100m in the foothills to over 7,500m to the north covering three distinct climatic zones: 1) the southern plains [...]

NRDC: The highly anticipated report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) directly linking climate change and extreme weather was released on Friday.  This report follows last month’s release of a statement from medical experts worldwide warning that climate change, and its resulting extreme weather, poses the “greatest threat to public health.” Both [...]

The Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region is highly dynamic as there are many socioeconomic and environmental drivers of change at play, including climate change. The impacts of these changes challenge the resilience of natural and human capacities and environments in the region. Climate change is believed to contribute to extreme weather events and possibly to increase [...]

MyRepublica: Experts from different countries including Nepal have expressed concerns over decreasing pollinator populations, as it results in low pollination rate posting threat to food security. About 25 experts and pollination management project managers from seven countries, who recently participated at international workshops in Chitwan and Kathmandu, stressed the need to formulate country strategies to [...]

Deccan Herald: Some time back, a lot of heat was generated over the controversial UN panel report on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.  This case study is from Andes, where a project on Painting mountains with White is going to be considered as solution. While the report on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers [...]

Kuenselonline: Climate Change Of late, farmer Rinchen of Semtokha is seeing some strange behaviour in her garden.  When trees in her garden at this time of the year shed leaves, a few apple trees have flowered again; and a plum tree is bearing fruit for the second time.  The banana plants are still green. “Usually, [...]

Oxfam: Review of Climate Change Adaptation Practices in South Asia. Climate change is predicted to have severe consequences for South Asia, particularly in agriculture, which employs more than 60 per cent of the region’s labor force. Some of the predicted impacts of climate change include: increased variability in both monsoon and winter rainfall patterns; increases [...]

Washington Post: Amid regional tensions, only 4 of 7 Himalayan nations meet for climate summit on the mountains. Four Himalayan nations, faced with erratic weather and the threat of melting glaciers and catastrophic floods, are hashing out a plan for preserving the vast mountain range and helping millions living in the foothills cope with climate [...]

One Earth: In India, extreme weather basically means the annual monsoon, and this season’s rains, which ended a few weeks ago, were a constant topic of conversation during the five days I’ve just spent traveling around the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. U.P., as people call it here, is one of the poorest states in [...]

Radio Netherlands Worldwide: The Climate Change Risk Atlas ranked Nepal as the fourth most vulnerable country in the world last year. Given the vulnerability of the Himalayan country, USAID donated $30mn for the Hariyo Ban project last week. The programme hopes to build mechanisms that will help Nepal cope with climate change risks. Along Nepal’s [...]

IPS: CUZCO, Peru- “This year the freeze killed my crops, our small livestock died, and now I can’t even sleep because I’m worried sick thinking about how to put food on my family’s table, since I’m a widow,” said Rosaura Huatay, an indigenous farmer in Peru’s northern Andes highlands. Huatay and four other campesinas or [...]

Climate Change and Himalayan Cold Deserts: Mapping vulnerability and threat to ecology and indigenous livelihoods The remote cold desert stretches of high altitude Himalayas, having a fragile ecosystem are characterized by complex interplay of climatic and geo-morphological processes, availability of limited natural resources and economic  conditions leading to accelerated resource degradation and associated environmental consequences [...]