Ekantipur: Climate change is the definitive challenge of the 21st century. Changes in the climate destroy the basis on which human life subsists; drought, for instance, leads to shortages in food and water. Rising sea levels are already threatening the territories of small island states and vast stretches of coastland. Climate change impacts in Nepal [...]
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Hill Post: Himachal Green Court imposes Rs 100 Cr damages on Jaypee Cement Plant Getting tough on blatant violations of environment laws, a green bench of Himachal Pradesh High Court (India) on Friday not only imposed Rs 100 crore damages on Jaiprakash Associates Ltd. (JAL, a Indian industry) for having set up a whole cement [...]
One World South Asia: At an outreach event in New Delhi, India, climate experts said that South Asian countries will have to work hard on climate change related issues not just because the region is vulnerable but also because there is not much research and data collection. By: Rahul Kumar/OneWorld South Asia New Delhi: Even though [...]
Daily Mail: When it comes to conservation of river Ganga, the government seems to be moving at snail’s pace. Even 10 months after issuing a notification to declare 135 km stretch of the river from its origin at Gaumukh as eco-sensitive zone (ESZ), the ministry of environment and forests has failed to finalise it. The [...]
CICERO: Melting glaciers below 6000 metres create problems for Himalayan farmers. It is well documented that temperatures in the Himalayas have risen in recent decades and that glaciers in the region are losing mass. According to a study by Ren et al., many of the glaciers on the south slope of the central Himalayas have [...]
Sudan Division: Rio+20 offers the world a unique chance to advance the sustainable development agenda. The conference has three main objectives: to secure renewed political commitment to sustainable development, to assess progress and gaps in implementation of agreed commitments, and to address new and emerging challenges. The two themes of the Conference are a green [...]
Centre for Global Development: Adaptation to climate change in developing countries is to a large extent about building resilience, including social and institutional responsiveness to change. In that sense it is about “development.” However, adaptation finance is not development assistance. It is better thought of as a financial transfer based on the “causal responsibility” for [...]
AFP: Experiments that try to simulate global warming’s impact on plants badly underestimate what happens in the real world, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The investigation backs anecdotal evidence from farmers and gardeners, especially in the northern hemisphere, who say seasonal plants are stirring into life far earlier than [...]
Zee News: Loss of biodiversity apparently impacts ecosystems as much as climate change, pollution and other major forms of environmental stress, according to a new study. The study is the first comprehensive effort to directly compare the effects of biological diversity loss to the anticipated effects of a host of other human-caused environmental changes. [...]
CDKN: Thousands of researchers and sustainable development practitioners gathered in London for the conference ‘Planet under Pressure: Knowledge towards solutions’, (26-29 March, 2012). The conference aimed to bring together the latest scientific knowledge and practical thinking on sustainability to feed in to the Rio+20 Summit in June. The focus of participant discussions and subsequent ‘calls [...]
WRI: This working paper provides regular updates of the Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PPs) and National Programme Documents (NPDs) submitted by REDD+ Country Participants to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and to the United Nations’ Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD). The World Bank administered [...]
Sustain Labour: Nepalese workers and their trade unions are committed to fighting climate change by protecting Nepal’s beautiful forests and livelihoods, and are taking concrete actions to reduce deforestation. For over 30 years Nepalese communities have been working hard to manage their forests and to help protect their environment. Between 119 million and 1.42 billion [...]
Albright Stonbridge Group: In the energy and environment sector, India currently faces a clear inflection point with the potential to become an innovative leader in the use and development of clean energy and renewable products. While the scale of the energy and environmental challenges is tremendous, it also represents a significant opportunity. The Government of [...]
Dawn (PESHAWAR): To offset the effects of climatic change and global warming in the country, the Pakistan Forests Institute (PFI), Peshawar has completed a comprehensive study to determine the climatic change scenarios in Pakistan’s various ecological zones and its impact on forests resources. “It is the first professional attempt to address the emerging issues of [...]
Kashmir Life: After Sichaen Glacier devoured more than 130 men in a single avalanche early this month, Islamabad is again seeking a way out from the inhuman, refrigerated battleground it is sharing with India for the last 28 years. In the apparent spring of relations, if the two countries warm up to undo their glaciated [...]
Alertnet: At present, close to one billion people suffer from hunger. Experts agree that there is a high risk of climate change affecting food security at the global level, with the most negative impacts in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. The additional risk of climate change could put several hundred million at risk of [...]
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 [...]
ICTSD: In this article, Ulrich Hoffmann calls into question the notion of “green growth,” asserting that economic growth cannot be decoupled from a related rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and policymakers advocate a fundamental shift towards “green growth” as the new, qualitatively-different growth paradigm, based on enhanced material/resource/energy (MRE) efficiency and drastic changes [...]
Nature: Some countries could save money by switching from solar to wind. Generating wind energy is more than twice as cheap as solar photovoltaic (PV) energy production, a study of alternative energy in six developing countries has found. The findings, published in Nature Climate Change last week1, could help inform global debates on financing initiatives [...]
(Reuters) – Whether it is melting glaciers, coastal erosion or drying lakes, a new app displays the impact of climate change on the planet by using before and after satellite images. Called Fragile Earth, the app for iPhone and iPad shows how our planet is impacted by global warming by featuring more than 70 sites [...]
Forbs: The island of Hispaniola is split between two countries – Haiti and the Dominican Republic – each with more than its share of problems. Haiti’s are worse, and for myriad reasons, but one thing is clear: over its tumultuous history, Haiti has lost more of the living ecosystems that support its economy than its [...]
Times of India: The fight against climate change will take a strategic jump in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) with the government intending to plough in almost Rs 2 lakh crore through the various missions, the working group on climate of the 12th Five-Year Plan has said. The report seeks setting up of a dedicated [...]
Harvard Science: 50-year model suggests regional pollution obscured a global trend Climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a “warming hole” over the eastern United States — that is, a cold patch where the effects of global warming were [...]
Sudan Vision: The timely, thought-provoking essays of this book provide valuable evidence of the impact of different gender and faith perspectives on practical development issues while also highlighting the complexities and ambiguities of religious influences. Development workers, researchers and social activists will gain from these studies a greater awareness and more critical understanding of how [...]
Times of India: When biologist Kamal Bawa talks of global well-being on a sunny April morning in Bangalore, he draws attention to how every human, animal and tree in the ecosystem is enmeshed in the rhythm of life. The recent Gunnerus Sustainability Award from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS) and election [...]
Business Bhutan: A shared vision and collaborative efforts at public and the private sector level can mitigate the impact of climate change. Climate change affects everyone and while countries around the world are failing to reach a global agreement on the issue, it is at the local levels that global action must begin. This is [...]
Financial Express: The green climate fund (GCF), established as a result of the Durban talks last year for easy access to funds for developing countries tackling climate change, has found interest from six countries—Germany, Switzerland, Namibia, Mexico, Korea and Poland. The six countries have expressed interest to host the fund referring to the ability to [...]
The Himalayan glaciers are not shrinking at an alarming rate under the influence of the global warming syndrome. This was the assertion made by Dr Akhilesh Gupta, Advisor and Head of the Climate Change Programme of the Government of India (GoI). He was delivering the keynote address at a consultation workshop organised by the Assam [...]
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, [...]
Dawn Pakistan: Speakers at a workshop here on Thursday said that glacier lake outburst floods (GLOF) were posing threat to Hindukush-Himalya region that could play havoc with human settlements. They stressed the need for taking steps to reduce the risk. The workshop titled ‘Reducing risks and vulnerabilities from glacier outburst floods in northern Pakistan’ was [...]
Prevention Web: Using new ways to confront persistent challenges is one of MIT’s greatest strengths, and an idea reinforced this week in regard to climate change by the New York Times writer Andrew Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog. “There’s never been a better time to share and shape and collaborate” to help communicate [...]
ABC Science (Anna Salleh ): The greenhouse effect is accelerating the global water cycle almost twice the rate predicted by climate change models, say researchers. Oceanographer Dr Susan Wijffels of the CSIRO and colleagues report their findings today in the journal Science. “The models predict a 4 to 5 per cent amplification of the global [...]
SciDevnet: Climate researchers pay too little attention to social sciences, delegates at the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change have heard. The meeting in Nepal (5–6 April) was attended by around 30 country representatives, and concluded with a ‘Kathmandu Call for Action’, with a view to highlighting the specific needs of mountain countries [...]
RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27, 2012 (IPS) – Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping. Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation [...]
WorldAgroforestry: Agriculture is the human enterprise that is most vulnerable to climate change. Tropical agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture is particularly vulnerable, as smallholder farmers do not have adequate resources to adapt to climate change. While agroforestry may play a significant role in mitigating the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHG), it also has a role [...]
IRIN: The governance of natural resources like land, the oceans, rivers and the atmosphere, can affect the impact of some of the world’s biggest crises caused by natural events like droughts and floods. How best to manage those resources has been at the heart of the work by Nobel Prize winner (economics) Elinor Ostrom. She [...]
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, [...]
IISD: The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) Sixth International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation (CBA6) brought stakeholders and practitioners together to discuss community-based adaptation (CBA) planning and practices. The conference focused on communicating how communities are adapting to climate change, and addressed the following themes: scaling-up CBA; water resources; biodiversity and forests; coastal zones; [...]
Eurasia Review: Environmentalists and scientists have urged India and Pakistan to free the world’s highest battleground of Himalayan Siachen glaciers from military forces to avoid devastating ecological disasters. “From human and environmental perspective, it is an expensive and tragic standoff on Siachen between two countries where either is too proud to back off unilaterally as [...]
IPS News: As a result of climate change-related extreme weather events like a rise in the sea level and increasingly intense storms alternating with drought, Caribbean island nations are facing the challenge of adopting adaptation measures that could be too costly for their budgets. One important message from the report is that costly investments are [...]
BBC News: Leading energy ministers have been told the world is on track for a long-term temperature increase of 6C unless they change their priorities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said on current trends, emissions would double from 2009 to 2050. The deputy director of the IEA, Richard Jones, urged ministers: “Please take our warning [...]
The Hindu: India’s space and security capabilities are poised for a big leap with the launch of an entirely indigenous radar imaging satellite, RISAT-1. In the popular mind, radar satellites have a swashbuckling image that is often associated with covertly watching over other countries and tracking their military hardware. These satellites can certainly serve that [...]
New Scientist: [Michael Marshall ]Europe is doing it, Brazil is doing it, and now Mexico is doing it too. The country has passed a package of laws committing it to act on climate change. It is only the second developing nation to set greenhouse gas emissions cuts in the letter of the law. The package [...]
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 [...]
UNECE: The Third workshop on water and climate change in transboundary basins: Making adaptation work will bring together more than 140 participants from all over the world on 25 and 26 April 2012 in Geneva to discuss how to prevent conflict in transboundary basins over dwindling water resources by cooperating at the transboundary level in [...]
UN Solution Exchange: The query on ‘Flood resistant tree crops for ensuring food security’ was floated by UN Solution Exchange India to its members. The responses got are interesting one and could be replicated in the mountains as well. The UNSE members opined that though India has rich traditional knowledge and wisdom to mitigate disasters, [...]
NPR (by Richard Harris) : The Himalayas are sometimes called the world’s “third pole” because they are covered with thousands of glaciers. Water from those glaciers helps feed some of the world’s most important rivers, including the Ganges and the Indus. And as those glaciers melt, they will contribute to rising sea levels. So a [...]
CGIAR: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and supply agreements in the agricultural sector have a significant role to play to promote agricultural climate change mitigation and decrease pressure on the earth’s land and climate. Private sector engagement can also promote food security and positively affect the livelihoods of smallholder agricultural producers in developing countries. This states [...]
Express Tribune: Struck by worst natural disasters in recent years, Pakistan needs resources, long-term policy and political commitment to cope with climate change. This was said by Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) Chief Executive Naseer Memon during a workshop on climate change on Monday. A group of journalists attended the session, which was organised by a [...]
Alertnet: Indigenous communities around the world are highly vulnerable to climate change but instead of seeing them as victims, policy-makers should tap into their centuries-old knowledge of adapting to extreme weather patterns, aid workers say. In Iran, which has some 700 nomadic tribes, pastoralists have been successfully adapting to climate fluctuations for 12,000 years, development [...]
Himalayan Times: Ace mountaineer Appa Sherpa, who has conquered Mount Everest for 21 times, is planning to announce a greater alliance for the preservation of Himalayan region in the country and taking an initiative to form an international support group for the overall development of the region. “With an aim to preserve the entire Himalayan [...]
Sciencecodex: Recognizing the knowledge gap between the existing evidence of climate change and adaptation on the ground, researchers in Asia launched a novel learning platform to improve agricultural resilience to changing weather patterns, and to reduce emissions footprint. The Climate Smart Agriculture Learning Platform for South Asia, established by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate [...]
Media Matters: As the Earth’s climate warms, glaciers are shrinking worldwide. But Fox News is using a recent study showing stable glaciers in one region of the Himalayas to obscure the global melting trend and cast doubt on climate change. Study: One Mountain Range Is Bucking The Global Melting Trend Study: Karakoram Range In Himalayas “Is Holding Steady, And May Even Be [...]
Deccan Chronical: Indian and Pakistani glaciologists have crossed swords over whether the Siachen glacier is melting or not. Leading Indian glaciologist Dr Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India and author of a report on glaciers prepared for the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) in 2010 has stated categorically that the [...]
EVI: The changing dynamics of agriculture sector and the emerging threat of climate change The agriculture sector and its remarkable advances during the middle of 20th century is considered to be the basis for securing the food supply of a rapidly expanding human population especially in the developing countries that was enjoying the fruits of [...]
Environmental and Civil News: Climate change impacts are likely to affect societies in complex and broad-ranging ways as technological, economic, social and ecological changes take place across regions, groups and sectors. Climate Change impacts have cascading effects on social and health concerns. Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable development are often developed separately at the local as [...]
New Scientist: As Arctic sea ice breaks apart, massive amounts of methane could be released into the atmosphere from the cold waters beneath. High concentrations of the greenhouse gas have been recorded in the air above cracks in the ice. This could be evidence of yet another positive feedback on the warming climate – leading [...]
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) film Himalayan Meltdown won the prestigious Platinum Award in the broadcast documentary category last weekend at the 45th Annual Worldfest International Film Festival, the oldest independent film festival in the world. The one-hour film examines the shrinking glaciers of the Himalayas and the effects they have on the lives and [...]
Business Mirror: There is an urgent need to enhance the capacity of poorest communities to cope with climate change and minimize risk to natural disasters, particularly in Africa with 414 million people and Asia with 1.9 billion people, according to the Sixth International Conference on Community-based Adaptation on Climate Change. “Communities in poor countries are [...]
