Population is ‘our biggest challenge’ says government chief scientist Sir John Beddington. The next world population milestone of 8 billion will come sooner than we think – perhaps as early as 2025 – yet we remain reluctant to debate the issue. A forthcoming Royal Society report may force us to While many commentators look ahead [...]

Improving access to information technology can help communities assess their own vulnerability and boost local planning, says John Waugh. Climate change affects virtually all of the natural systems necessary for human survival. It has implications for water supply, food production, health and physical security. Climate impacts will vary from region to region, so planning for [...]

GIZ: The Indo-German project Climate Change Adaptation in Rural Areas of India (CCA RAI, www.ccarai.org) is pleased to announce the launch of the book “Adaptation to Climate Change with a Focus on Rural Areas and India“. The publication provides an overview of the main issues in current adaptation discussions and suggests adaptation options in six [...]

Climate Change Study Center in Islamabad: Pakistan is situated in one of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of climate change. Better governance system with sufficient policy interventions coupled with support from the international community can help minimize the adverse impacts of climate change. In Pakistan the policy responses to climate change in some [...]

Sharing research-based knowledge and promoting innovation are unprecedentedly critical for effectiveness climate change mitigation and adaptation programmes worldwide, particularly in developing countrie. Scientists can significantly help advance policies to promote best and environmental practices in all socio-economic spheres including agriculture, livestock rearing, irrigation, water management, environmental-friendly drainage and sanitation. Such roles by scientists can boost [...]

  Adaptive Capacity The combination of the strengths, attributes, and resources available to an individual, community, society, or organization that can be used to prepare for and undertake actions to reduce adverse impacts, moderate harm, or exploit beneficial opportunities (IPCC, SREX, 2012) Climate Climate defined as the average weather, or as the statistical description in [...]

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 [...]

A cold war has been going on among government departments over control of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) cell for the last four months. The devolved Ministry of Environment became the National Designated Authority (NDA) of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change after it established the cell and placed it under Enercon back [...]

On January 2, 2012, local communities in the Thulokhola watershed in Nuwakot gave the SLPS project research team a heartfelt traditional welcome with garlands and red powder, as well as flowers, fruits, coconuts and water jars adorned with flowers as they proceeded up the hill. The team was first greeted by the local communities at [...]

Climate Change and Development short course: 5 – 18 September 2012:  The purpose of this course is to equip non-specialists with a broad understanding of what climate change may mean for low-income populations and what the scope and prospects are for adapting to change in the context of development issues and poverty reduction. The course [...]

The days when doctors used to advise the sick a visit to the pristine hills may soon be over as trends indicate that higher altitudes would be more susceptible to diseases caused by an erratic weather pattern attributed to climate change. The draft of the first of its kind compilation of various studies aimed at [...]

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 [...]

Noreen Haider: It has been more than six years when the Northern areas of Pakistan were hit by one of the most devastating earthquake in the history of the region. The earthquake measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and within the very few first seconds created an unimaginable devastation in an area of more than [...]

CDKN: Disasters and Climate Change Disasters can be sudden, such as earthquakes or floods, or may build up gradually, such as a drought.  An important consequence of climate change will be the increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme events such as floods, droughts, windstorms and heat waves. Whether hazards become disasters depends on [...]

Through Climate Change community of UN Solution Exchange India the Earth Day Network has floated query on Women and the Green Economy for its Campaign (http://www.earthday.org/wage) to increase the opportunities for women’s leadership in designing and advancing the new Green Economy. It finds that there is limited participation of women in the discussions, planning, and leadership of the newly [...]

Earth Child Institute (ECI) Nepal officially inaugurated its first initiative “Global School Campaign” on Jan 21, Saturday, to inform and empower children on global environmental issues, and encourage them to adopt green, healthy and sustainable lifestyles in their schools and communities. To achieve the goal, they are envisioning to collaborate with 200 schools around the [...]

Scientific American Blog: Kanchha, our Sherpa guide, took off at an unexpectedly fast pace along what seemed little more than a dry and dusty yak track.  We chased after him as best we could, affected as we were by the combination of altitude and the large lunch we had just consumed at the teahouse at [...]

UPSC Portal: 1. Overview India is faced with the challenge of sustaining its rapid economic growth while dealing with the global threat of climate change. This threat emanates from accumulated greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, anthropogenically generated through long-term and intensive industrial growth and high consumption lifestyles in developed countries. While engaged with the [...]

To have a united footing before next round of climate talks in Qatar, the Basic group – India, China, South Africa and Brazil — has decided to discuss their strategy before individual countries make their submissions for the Durban platform before end of this February. The climate talks To have a united footing before next [...]

Scientific American: Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself. Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, [...]

Economics Time: The Finance Ministry of Government of India will expand the size and scope of the annual Economic Survey, to be released sometime in March, by incorporating chapters on global imbalances, human development and climate change issues. “We will come out with new chapters including ‘India and the Globe’ to give a view on [...]

Alertnet: Achieving development despite fast depleting natural resources and without compromising on needs of the future generations is today a serious challenge for planners, policymakers, researchers and scientists in South Asian countries, and collaboration will be crucial. Researchers and scientists have come up with ideas and technologies to make sustainable development through sustainable use of [...]

Canberratimes: Canada’s announcement before Christmas that it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol could not have been better timed to puncture the sense of progress generated by the UN climate change conference in Durban just two days earlier. There, delegates had celebrated a dramatic and unexpected conclusion that saw all 194 countries (including Canada) [...]

Himalayan Times: The Cabinet today approved the Ministry of Environment proposal to host the meeting of mountain countries in Kathmandu on April 5-6, and formed a 13-member committee under Environment Minister to make preparations for the same. Last July, the Cabinet had given the ministry a go-ahead to hold such a conference in Kathmandu on [...]

Everestindanger: UNESCO committee meets in SA Sir Edmund Hillary has joined environmental campaigners and lawyers in urging the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, who are meeting in Durban, South Africa this week (10-17 July), to place Mount Everest on the UN endangered list because of the impacts of climate change [1]. The World Heritage Convention legally [...]

Devex: The world’s major bilateral donors continue to invest in climate change programming, primarily to comply with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change $30 billion Fast Start Finance mechanism for enhanced action on mitigation, adaptation, REDD+, technology development and transfer and capacity building.The chart above and corresponding analysis shed light on the financial commitments [...]

Korea Herald: Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardize these “water towers” on which one billion Asians depend for dry season and drought year flows. More than 450 million Asians live within the low-elevation coastal [...]

Dawn: Development projects in the country are often executed without considering their human and environmental impact and sustainable development can only be achieved by putting people and environment at the heart of development process. This was stated by experts and social scientists belonging to Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), here Wednesday in a meeting with [...]

Business Green: Earlier this month, the world’s heads of state, government, industry and NGOs met in Durban, South Africa, to discuss our common future. These climate negotiations were more successful than many people had feared. A new international climate agreement will enter into force in 2020. This agreement makes life more predictable for industry and [...]

Climate Ethics: I. Introduction: What Is Missing In Reporting About The Durban Outcome? It has now been two weeks since negotiations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were completed in the early morning of Sunday, December 11, 2011 in Durban, South Africa. We [...]

Scientific American: Given the profits made from filming the natural world, can a scheme be worked out to pay for this ecosystem service? David Biello reports. Entire television channels broadcast the wonders of the natural world. To gain viewers and sell ads, they rely on lions hauling down zebras, aerial tracking shots of the icy [...]

Bhutan is soon expected to have a strong information database on environment with the establishment of Environment Research Centre by Royal Society for Protection of Nature (RSPN). Currently being planned, the research centre will provide researchers, students, government agencies and the public updated information and critical scientific data on environment. The programme manager of RSPN, [...]

SIMON Lucas is spending another Christmas without real ale and Stilton cheese – which he is still unable to find in any of Kathmandu’s shops. It is nearly a decade since the 45-year-old and his family left High Wycombe to live in Asia – so they are used to doing the festive season in a [...]

Pakistan has been warned of frequent floods of disastrous nature like the ones that battered the country in 2010 and 2011 in the Indus river owing to rapid glacier retreat and shifting of monsoonal zones by about 100 kilometres towards northwest regions. In a recent communication it sent to the government, the Asian Development Bank [...]

GIZ: As we prepare the last edition of the newsletter for this year, COP 17 in Durban and its protracted finale are still very fresh in our minds. All of us who witnessed the summit were quite relieved when it did – two days after the scheduled end – finally yield the agreement of a [...]

Book: Because of the importance of mountains and the many services they provide, sustainable mountain development does not only regard mountain communities, but is a global concern.. Climate change, increasing natural disasters, food and energy crises, population growth, water scarcity and desertification, loss of biodiversity, degradation of ecosystems, migration, and growth of cities – the [...]

University world News: Pakistan has been hit by massive floods many times and once by a severe earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people. These, and numerous other problems the country faces, have raised questions about the role of universities. Concern is growing that most courses taught at universities are irrelevant to Pakistan’s social and [...]

Denverpost: The U.S. government is deploying Colorado scientists to lead a $5.4 million effort to gauge the impact of shrinking Himalayan glaciers on water supplies across Asia. The question: Are rivers that sustain more than 2 billion people fed primarily by water from rainfall, by seasonal snowmelt or by the glaciers that are vulnerable to [...]

Daily Times: Millions of people are affected in the Himalayan Indian-Tibetan border country because of reduced rainfall and crops. Combining surface and satellite data, and high resolution computer climate models, it is clear that these trends will become progressively more serious The main aim of the UN Climate Summit at Durban, which concluded unsuccessfully, was [...]

SciDevNet: A string of high-altitude research stations across Asia could shed light on how climate change is affecting one of the world’s largest ice masses. Spearheaded by the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the initiative is building state-of-the-art research facilities across South Asia, including in Nepal, Pakistan and [...]

Go-Green: The series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.   Governments meeting at the annual climate conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon [...]

Sci Devnet: [DURBAN] Marginalised farmers in the developing world may soon be able to ‘see’ into the future through a tool that will help them adapt to climate change by simulating how their crop production will be affected 20 years from now. The open access tool, called ‘climate analogues’, was presented on the sidelines of [...]

Scientific American: The latest research shows that climate talks must lead to more aggressive action to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming. By 2020, human activity could produce some 55 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, up from roughly 36 billion metric tons currently. All the accumulating gas is enough to raise [...]

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 [...]

Durban Post: Dr. C. S. Silori* writing from Durban on Day-II & III, 29-30 November 2011 I had promised to come back, and here I am again with a short report of what happened on day 3 of the ongoing conference of the parties (COP 17) in Durban. It was a hectic day, as I [...]

Mountain Partnership: Magnitudes of people are affected directly and indirectly by changes in mountain environments, not just in high altitude villages (the so-called highlands) but also in cities and populations (lowlands) dependent on the wealth of goods and services that mountains provide. In this context, the Mountain Partnership Secretariat has organized three regional meetings in [...]

NICCD: Leadership plays a crucial role within processes of change and transformation, particularly those associated with the impacts of climate change and variability. In vulnerable developing contexts affected by more frequent and intense climatic events, local leaders are key in the adoption of innovation and learning, as well as in the capacity of vulnerable groups [...]

New York Times: With intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations will gather in Durban, South Africa, starting Monday to try to advance, if only incrementally, the world’s response to dangerous climate change. To those who have followed the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate [...]

New Agriculturist: As a major user of freshwater and fossil fuels, a significant producer of greenhouse gases and a frequent trigger to deforestation, agriculture has tended to be seen as part of the climate change problem rather than an agent of mitigation. The concept of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) seeks to reverse that pattern, albeit [...]

Guardian: Global emissions need to start to fall within the next five years or so, and each delay makes failure costlier and harder to avoid. The will to act on climate change is out of political energy, running on empty. The problem is (relatively) distant, complex and intractable. The solution is costly, immediate, and the [...]

Occupy movement comes to Cop 17–News from UN climate convention in Durban. Inspired by the Occupy Wall St. movement, protesters calling for “climate justice” are set to gather at the opening of UN climate talks in Durban organisers say. A meeting at the ‘Speaker’s Corner’ will be called, an assembly,” Patrick Bond, a professor at the [...]

United Nations Development Programme and National Institute of Administrative Research sign USD500, 000 agreement to strengthen training of officials on climate change issues. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National Institute of Administrative Research (NIAR), Government of India,  signed a partnership in support of national efforts to address climate change through strengthening the [...]

The Hindu: In Ranikhet, if you follow a tall man on a unicycle you would reach the India office of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). Director of the school, N. Ravi Kumar, is a rock climber and mountaineer with keen interest in cycling. Predictably, the modest premises hosting office, hostel, equipment store, merchandise room [...]

The News: The Building Code of Pakistan (Energy Provisions 2011) already approved by the Steering Committee will soon be finalised by the Task Force of Pakistan Engineering Council. National Energy Conservation Centre (Enercon) Assistant Chief (Buildings) Abrar Malik stated this at a seminar on ‘Cool Roofs: Solar Radiation Management (SRM) Techniques to Combat Climate Change [...]

The EU-UNDP Low Emission Capacity Building Programme (LECBP) was launched in January 2011 as part of a joint collaboration between the European Union (European Commission and Member States) and the United National Development Programme. This collaborative, country driven programme aims to strengthen technical and institutional capacities at the country level, while at the same time [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Reliefweb: Shared knowledge provides better Climate Change adaptation. In order to strengthen the work on climate change adaptation in Asian countries, more knowledge is required and a better exchange of experiences. A newly created regional platform will provide those who work with climate change adaptation with the correct tools so that they can better develop [...]

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 [...]