admin January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
admin December 8th, 2011
As EU commissioner Georgieva was speaking about the growing frequency and intensity of natural disasters – and linking them explicitly to climate change – the world’s leaders were, in effect, agreeing to do nothing about said climate change at COP 17 in Durban.
Of course, they wouldn’t put it like that, they’re all being very reasonable whilst at the same time doing what they perceive to be their jobs in representing their national interests.
admin November 27th, 2011
Two years ago the COP at Copenhagen was massive news with much made of the fact that this was probably the last opportunity to sort out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out at the end of 2012 and famously remains unsigned by the USA.
That opportunity, of course, came and went, as did COP16 at Cancun in Mexico and now we are on to COP17 in Durban, which opens tomorrow with expectations so low that they are practically invisible. One measure of the failure to get any successor to Kyoto is that no one now seems to expect that to happen.
admin November 7th, 2011
African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released by the US Department of Energy.
Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.
This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago. And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen. Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.
admin May 6th, 2011
Two stories published today give different halves of the same picture. In Western Tanzania 3,500 people are made homeless by what are described as ‘devastating’ floods. Meanwhile from Bonn in Germany comes the news that none of the world’s rich countries have met a May 1st deadline for outlining how they will help developing countries combat climate change.
In fact, two countries did respond by the May 1st deadline set up at last year’s Cancun COP meeting – Russia and Ukraine. But they both wrote in to say that they did not feel obliged to contribute under the deal under which the rich countries would provide almost $30 billion in initial “fast-start” climate funds from 2010-12.
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admin April 19th, 2011
Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months. Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.
Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.
admin February 15th, 2011
Sometimes it does seem that the link between global warming and actual climate change is hard to establish. We know from the massive evidence of the scientific literature that the earth is warming. We know from our own experience that the climate is changing, but tying the two together can be hard.
But now Nature Climate Change has reported on an academic study that shows that spikes in Indian Ocean sea-surface temperature have changed the region’s weather patterns and triggered more frequent droughts in East Africa in recent decades.
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admin November 12th, 2010
In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.
The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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admin August 3rd, 2010
The complexities of global warming and the interconnectedness of world markets have been starkly illustrated this week. And, as so often, the people to suffer from these random events are the poor in general and the African poor in particular.
As the worst famine for several years stalks Niger and Chad, IRIN News reports that the 2010 rainy season in West Africa has opened with hail storms in Guinea and the heaviest rain in 50 years in northern Chad. Floods have killed at least 80 people and destroyed homes, bridges, septic tanks, livestock, crops and food stocks; dams have broken, and wells and latrines and have been submerged.
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admin July 29th, 2010
Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.
“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.