Global

This week, the president of Vanuatu, Baldwin Lonsdale, made the assertion that climate change is contributing to the disaster in Vanuatu. “This cyclone is a huge setback for the country’s development,” Lonsdale told the Third U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, on March 14. “This is why I am attending this conference and why Vanuatu wants to see a…

Stating that women are the most vulnerable group hit hard by the climate change and environmental effects, the government further pledged that it would prioritize policies and programs in the sector of environment and climate change mitigation and adaptation in the coming days. Addressing the on-going 59th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at UN Headquarters on Wednesday, Minister for…

It is now time for countries and regions to turn the outputs of Lima into realities, both nationally and regionally. The African Union’s position had always been that adaptation is a priority in all actions related to addressing climate change in Africa. However, this position had been reasoned differently in Central Africa. Here, mitigation—through REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), conservation and sustainable…

The “Manila call to action on climate change”, issued last week on the occasion of the French president's state visit to the Philippines, summarizes what is at stake when, from November 30 to December 11, 2015, the yearly round of climate change negotiations will take place in Paris. It has become, unfortunately, an annual event where despite the urgency to act, progress remains too slow…

The prisoner's dilemma provides a great framework to understand (in)action on climate change. This is a game in game theory that shows why two rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it maybe in their best interests to do so. The rules are as follows: Two prisoners are in two cells unable to talk together. They know this: if both keep silent, they both get…

The Atlas, which provides comparable risk data for 198 countries across 26 separate issues, identifies Bangladesh as the country most at risk, followed by Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Haiti, Ethiopia, Philippines, Central African Republic and Eritrea. The growth economies of Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Pakistan and Mozambique also feature in the ‘extreme risk’ category. One of the unifying characteristics of these economies identified by…

A declaration announced as part of a UN summit on climate change being held in New York also pledges to halve the rate of deforestation by the end of this decade and to restore hundreds of millions of acres of degraded land. Backers of the New York declaration on forests claim their efforts could save between 4.5bn and 8.8bn tonnes of carbon emissions per year…

According to Wolfram Mauser at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, about two-thirds of all land that could even be potentially suitable for agricultural use in its current state is already in use, with the last third either part of protected ecosystems or likely going to be put into use in the approaching decades and the world population continues to grow. However, according to a study recently published in the…

Panasonic, Fujitsu and others looking for an opportunity in a niche market to offset the decline in demand for consumer electronics, are working in greenhouses and controlled by automatic sensors to ensure constant conditions to produce high quality vegetables all year fields. Fujitsu says its agricultural system Akisai cloud means users can sit behind a desk in Tokyo, or even in New York, while cultivating…

Read the article here: https://www.thestar.com.my/News/Environment/2014/08/18/Crop-survival-in-a-hot-climate/ Source: The Star Online | 18 August 2014

"The study is the first to confirm that human activities have increased water vapour in the upper troposphere," said Brian Soden, professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. To investigate the potential causes of a 30-year moistening trend in the upper troposphere, a region 3-7 miles above the Earth's surface, Soden and colleagues measured water vapour in…

The experts from Stanford University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the odds of a major production slowdown of wheat and corn, even with a warming climate, were not very high. But the risk was about 20 times more significant than it would be without global warming, and it might require planning by organizations that were affected by international food availability and…

We can't yet predict ahead of time how these cycles will change. The good news is that it doesn't matter from a big picture climate perspective, because over the long-term, temperature influences from El Niño and La Niña events cancel each other out. However, when we examine how climate model projections have performed over the past 15 years or so, those natural cycles make a…

The State of the Climate in 2013 report, published online Thursday by the American Meteorological Society, showed that greenhouse gases, sea levels, global temperatures and other key climate indicators were all on the rise last year. The report, compiled by 425 scientists from 57 countries around the world, provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental…

The researchers examined 15 years of migration data for more than 7,000 families in Indonesia and found that increases in temperature and, to a lesser extent, rainfall influenced a family's decision to permanently migrate to another of the country's provinces. They report in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that increases in average yearly temperature took a detrimental toll on people's…

This makes it more important than ever to take urgent and drastic action to curb climate change by reducing carbon emissions, he argues. Lord Stern, who wrote a hugely influential review on the financial implications of climate change in 2006, says the economic models that have been used to calculate the fiscal fallout from climate change are woefully inadequate and severely underestimate the scale of…

"Greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise, with the most threatening impact happening on small island states." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the world's 52 small island states contributed less than one percent of greenhouse-gas emissions annually, yet found themselves "on the front lines" in terms of impacts. "I urge everyone to think about the plight of small island developing states and to take inspiration…

The chart below is the consensus forecast for the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society: If this El Niño does start fairly quickly and become quite strong, as many currently expect, then 2014 could well become the hottest year on record, and 2015 would likely break all previous global records…

In particular, the numbers show a shift from the developed world to developing countries as the main bases of operations for renewable growth. In China alone, solar installations increased five-fold from 2011 to 2013, providing the demand that’s largely fueled solar’s momentum. IRENA also pointed to skills shortages among global workers as one factor that could hold back further growth, though that kind of thing…