ICIMOD: The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region is blessed with a diversity of honeybee species; five species – Apis cerana, Apis dorsata, Apis florea, Apis laboriosa, and Apis andreniformis – are indigenous, while Apis mellifera is introduced. Of these species, only Apis cerana and Apis mellifera can be kept in hives and managed for honey [...]

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 [...]

Chinadialogue: Tourism offers an opportunity to rebuild the local economy of Pakistan’s Swat Valley, ravaged by conflicts and floods. But can it also restore its rivers and forests? Rina Saeed Khan reports. For years, Pakistan’s former princely state of Swat, famous for its fruit orchards, snow-clad mountains, Buddhist stupas and trout-filled rivers, was a popular [...]

Click Green: A new study from the University of California, Davis, provides a deeper understanding of the complex global impacts of deforestation on greenhouse gas emissions. The study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, reports that the volume of greenhouse gas released when a forest is cleared depends on how the trees [...]

National Geographic: Giant sauropods produced huge amounts of greenhouse gases, study suggests. Dinosaurs may have helped warm ancient Earth via their own natural gaseous emissions, a new study says. Like modern-day ruminants, giant plant-eating dinosaurs likely had microbes in their guts that gave off large amounts of methane—a potent greenhouse gas even more effective at [...]

The Gisborne Herald: SORRY Mr Hughes, I did indeed mislead readers. The concession by the IPCC that there is unlikely to be any warming wasn’t in the draft of the fifth report that was released to reviewers in late 2011. It was actually in the draft of the report mentioned by you. This, however, does [...]

Zee News: Climate change will be an additional stress on Indian forests, especially in Upper Himalayan stretches, which are already subjected to multiple challenges including over-extraction, livestock grazing and human impact, a government report said here today.   India’s second National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, released by Environment Minister [...]

ScienceDaily: A modeling study from the European Alps suggests that population declines to be observed during the upcoming decades will probably underestimate the long-term effects of recent climate warming on mountain plants. A European team of ecologists around Stefan Dullinger from the Department of Conservation Biology, Vegetation and Landscape Ecology of the University of Vienna [...]

Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma: I’m indeed grateful to all the members who made written submissions to the discussions on ‘rewriting mountain perspective‘. At bilateral level, many others have contributed their unwritten thoughts and reflections. While many have gone public with their inputs, others have restricted themselves to drawing-room conversations such that they remain ‘unidentified’ in 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

ScienceDaily: Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University. The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly.” “We were really surprised by the [...]

Science Daily: New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change. Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the research. Scientists [...]

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 [...]

Zee News: Patches of forest measuring anywhere between 0.1 hectare to 1200 hectares and which are bio-diversity hot spots have been unique to Meghalaya for centuries, but now they are falling into disarray owing to reasons as diverse as poverty, cultural change and migration. Local Khasi tribes consider the forests as “sacred groves”, some of [...]

RECOFTC (A Grassroots Capacity Building document for REDD+ in the Asia-Pacific Region): This publication serves as a resource for community level facilitators to provide explanations about the basics of climate change and the role of forests. It aims to raise the awareness of grassroots stakeholders for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) through [...]

National Geographic: “REDD is the new beast in the forest,” said Patrick Anderson of the Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia here at Climate Change Mitigation with Local Communities and Indigenous peoples workshop in Cairns, Australia. Deforestation gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year. As if that loss wasn’t bad [...]

Nature-Jeff Tollefson: Round-table talks aim to slow climate warming by transforming agriculture. The principle is seductively simple: to reduce carbon emissions, leave tropical forests standing. But a widely heralded approach in which rich nations would pay poorer ones to keep their forests intact has proved trickier to deploy than many had hoped. Now a consortium [...]

By Subir Ghosh, DNA: It’s bad news for all – from farmers to policymakers. Yields of tea, coffee and cardamom from high altitude plantations in the Western Ghats are falling because of the changing regional climate. Worse, the region is likely to see a 1.7-1.8 degrees C rise in temperature by 2030. Rainfall may increase [...]

Many of the world’s rarest and richest forests, located in high-altitudes, could be all but wiped out by the combined impact of man-made climate change and habitat destruction. An international scientific team has warned of the near-total loss of one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, the Mexican cloud forest, along with 70 percent of [...]

The EU has called on European governments to include data on CO2 emissions from farming and forestry in their efforts to tackle climate change. The draft law on accounting rules is in line with what was agreed at the Durban climate change conference in December. But the EU does not yet plan to include farming [...]

Case Study: Conventional agricultural practices in tropical latitudes, using modern plant breeding techniques, fertilizers, and irrigation, have resulted in an increased grain yield (Huxley, 1999). However, these agricultural practices have also played a major role in increasing the global total area of marginal land that is now substandard for the long-term production of food and [...]

Climate change and its impacts on forest ecosystems in Asia: In Asia, anticipated changes in climate include increases in temperature, precipitation and extreme weather events – including heat waves, floods and droughts – and seasonal shifts in rainfall patterns. These impacts are expected to vary among sub-regions, with high altitude and high latitude areas most [...]

Preening over plantations and weeds, green statistics conceal the alarming loss of natural, old-growth forests. One of the many miracles of India is that it has maintained one-fifth of its area under forest cover since Independence. The population has jumped three-and-a-half times since 1947 and with it the demand for agricultural land. During 1951-80, India [...]

The long-held contention that rural forest communities are the prime culprits in tropical forest destruction is increasingly being discredited, as evidence mounts that the best way to protect rainforests is to involve local residents in sustainable management. Some forest campaigners have been saying it for years, but now they have the research to prove it: [...]

A new study on rubber plantations highlights the need for the REDD+ climate change scheme to further consider biodiversity and rural livelihoods. Agricultural policies worldwide have traditionally favoured the conversion of rotating crops to homogenous, permanent rubber plantations because they are often perceived to be more beneficial for local development and better sequesters of carbon. [...]

Mr. Cyril R Raphael: In this article Mr. Raphael writes the agony of mountains in general by taking an example of overall development in one of the Indian mountain states called Uttarakhand. His discourse covers the social and economic development, governance, leadership, availability of basic amenities, health, education, livelihood, effectiveness of information and communication, role [...]

Alertnet: When Reshma Kunda talks about the land surrounding her village, her voice is full of reverence. “Our mountains and forests are like our gods. They give us grass, wood for fuel, water, medicines and food – everything we need for our lives,” says the farmer who lives in Godavari Kunda village, about 15 km [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the 3-day sustainability summit being held at an opulent 5-star hotel, over which Rajendra Pachauri will preside later this week. Since then Hilary Ostrov has dug a bit deeper into the program for that event. You can read about her findings here. The website for this annual summit tells us a [...]

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 [...]

Sciedevnet: A form of small-holder agroforestry in which trees are planted around the home, maximising the land left available for cash crops, may prove the best balance between sequestering carbon and making money by farming other crops, a study has found. There has been a proliferation of projects that encourage small-scale farmers to adopt tree [...]

RECOFTC: At Durban’s Forest Day 5, the resounding message was that REDD+ will not work if people are hungry. How can we expect the poor to conserve forest resources if their food security – their very survival – rests on the use or consumption of those resources? Part of the problem is a perceived trade-off [...]

SciDevNet: Current climate models and projections may be inaccurate because measurements are based on guidelines that do not include the effects of trees on the local climate, according to agroforestry experts. This in turn may be hindering effective adaptation by local farming communities, as the true effect of climate change on their crops is not [...]

As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests. This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut. [...]

Global warming results in habitat loss for many species, new research shows. In a world first, scientists with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Queensland have measured the relationship between climate change and habitat loss on plants and animals on a global scale. Their results, published recently in Global [...]

BBC News: Tropical forests in Africa may be more resilient to future climate change than the Amazon and other regions, a gathering of scientists has said. An international conference agreed that the region’s surviving tree species had endured a number of climatic catastrophes over the past 4,000 years. As a result, they are better suited [...]

Scientific American: A NASA study finds that climate change will change the mix of plants on nearly half of the planet. Climate change will alter the mix of vegetation on 49 percent of Earth’s land surface by the end of this century, scrambling and shifting existing ecosystems, according to a new study. Researchers at NASA [...]

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 [...]

Nature: Forest-monitoring project has measured 150,000 trees and provided researchers with reams of data. One of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this monthafter five years of data collection. The wealth of information gathered will help researchers to understand how climate change is affecting forests. The effort has been coordinated by Earthwatch, an environmental [...]

BioOne: This paper examines the use of forest resources by local residents in Jigme Singye Wangchuck National Park, Bhutan. It also inquires into local residents’ knowledge and perceptions of park management interventions. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey, group discussions, and observations. The results show that local people depend on forest resources for [...]

Business Green: Support for $100bn Green Climate Fund will help overhaul the UN’s carbon market and financing for forestry projects While reactions have been mixed as to the overall success of the Durban climate summit, some progress has been made in terms of agreeing a fund to help poor countries combat climate change, reform of [...]

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 [...]

The conversation: One of the topics under discussion at Durban is the role carbon farming and other forestry measures could have in reducing emissions. With the possibility that negotiations will not bring about an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, delegates are working on measures that could take place outside a climate agreement. The Conversation [...]

Durban Post by Dr.C. S. Silori*: This note is on the major happening during COP 17 at Durban in South Africa during UN Climate Change Conference on December 4-5, and how the ‘equity’ issues has emerged as major challenge for the world leaders in context to future development and climate change.  December 4, Sunday, was [...]

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 [...]

Reuters: Sammad Sheikh of Tangchekh village in north Kashmir cannot understand why the rice fields that his family cultivated for generations are drying up. “It is a mystery as to why water is getting scarcer in summers,” he says. “This has been happening for the past few years though there have been one or two [...]

IPS News-DURBAN: Global climate change can now be observed from space. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a new technology that can survey the world’s forests via satellites and provide a more accurate, global picture of common threats to the environment, such as deforestation, degradation or illegal logging. Using a remote sensing surveying [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times: With its massive chalk-white face of ice and snow, Thorthormi glacier in northern Bhutan looms high against a bright blue sky, nearly 4,450 meters above sea level. At the glacier’s base, a wide lake of murky water completes the dramatic scene at the rooftop of the world. But the beauty of [...]

Earth Times: COP17/CMP7 Logo; Credit: The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP7) to the Kyoto Protocol Date-Talk-Structure-Paper Action 1977:World Meteorological Organisation decides on a conference in 1977, [...]

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 [...]

Scientific American: Warmer temperatures will combine with numerous other factors to make diseases like malaria and West Nile virus harder to control. Climate change can influence how infectious diseases affect the world, particularly illnesses spread by vectors like mosquitoes. Now scientists have developed some understanding about how rainfall and temperature can influence malaria, dengue and [...]

Noreen Haider: Writes from her visit to the beautiful Naran valley of Khyber Pakhtunkwa province in Pakistan, where she observes various dimensions of social and environment development. Noreen came across various developmental projects and activities in the region and finds that poor education and poorly planned social and environmental projects lead to acute poverty natural [...]