Harvested News

Dr. Lynn Thiesmeyer, vice-president of the Environmental and Economic Research Institute of Myanmar, says the sheer number of livelihoods left in tatters made a rebound difficult. “A major natural disaster on the scale of Cyclone Nargis could pose a threat to government legitimacy and reverse progress made toward democratisation.” Delta residents who lost farms to salinisation or lost a season’s crop with no money to…

The scientists report in Nature Climate Change that they worked their way through more than 1.2 million distribution records of 25 species of British butterfly at intervals over the past 40 years. Britain has a long history of systematic bird and butterfly observation and much information had been recorded by enthusiastic amateur natural historians, and the partners in the study were agencies such as Butterfly…

1. Disaster response, rehabilitation and mitigation in the Philippines Post-typhoon recovery efforts in the Philippines will continue to concern aid groups in 2014 given the scale of the devastation and the assistance needed. The relief operations, dubbed the largest in the country since World War II, remain in its infancy and will need considerable time. Haiyan has steered global attention to the importance of disaster…

The extended forest moratorium and the REDD+ Agency in particular are crucial to help realize the governments commitment to the reduction of CO2 emissions in Indonesia by 26 percent by 2020, and by 40 percent with international support. The commitment was announced by President Yudhoyono in October 2009 and received a positive response from the Government of Norway which later agreed to sign a Letter…

The team has also said that creatures living in the remotest regions of the ocean will also be affected by changes in the environment. Decrease in the number of marine organisms will directly hit fisheries, researchers added. For the study, the team used latest climate models to understand the changes in food supply in the future. They then looked at the relationship between food supply…

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, known as REDD+, is a UN-designed program to ensure that it becomes more profitable for developing countries to leave their rainforests intact, rather than chopping down forests and selling the wood. As part of the program, rich countries are expected to pay forested nations to preserve their trees. The new REDD+ Agency seeks emissions reductions by preventing deforestation…

The two ministries involved in the utilization of renewable energy in the transportation sector are the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. "The initiative to utilize biodiesel for aircraft and renewable energy use is part of the government efforts to carry out its commitment to maintain the environment," Transportation Minister Evert Erenst Mangindaan said on Friday. The government, through Presidential…

When Philippine President Benigno Aquino III announced last week the staggering cost of rebuilding from the storm, the price tag – 8.17 billion dollars – and a pair of emergency loans to help meet that goal distressed debt reduction campaigners in the country who have for many years called for a cancellation of illegal debts. “Every dollar of funding assistance will be used in as…

Paje, whose appointment by President Aquino as secretary of the DENR has been questioned and bypassed for the third time by the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA) early this month, explains the reason for the deferment, which also sums up the three-year performance of the agency, whose main task is to manage the country’s natural wealth. “The true challenge in this position is actually striking…

Many of the world’s great cities are on low-lying coastal plains, or on river estuaries, and are therefore anyway at risk as sea levels rise because of global warming. But human action too – by damming rivers, by extracting ground water and by building massive structures on sedimentary soils – has accelerated coastal subsidence. Add to this the possibility of more intense tropical cyclones as…

And if the world reacts, stops burning fossil fuel, and invests in green energy, then your chances of being killed by a wind turbine become just so much higher. Holger Goerlitz, of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Interface that they looked at the challenge faced by bats that hunt with ultrasound…

The team's work, which has been supported through funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), is published by leading international journal Global Change Biology today (Friday, October 18), in a paper entitled 'Multi-decadal range changes versus thermal adaptation for north east Atlantic oceanic copepods in the face of climate change'. The paper's lead author Stephanie Hinder, a PhD student in Swansea University's Department of…