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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Tags: Chad, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, natural disasters, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, UNICEF
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.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO
admin June 26th, 2010
Five of the ten countries in the world with the least secure supplies of water are in Africa. And Africa has the unpleasant honour of taking the top four places in a new report, ‘Water Security Risk Index’ published this week by Maplecroft, a firm specialising in corporate risk intelligence.
The top ten countries with the least secure supplies of water – shown in dark blue on the map below - are 1. Somalia, 2. Mauritania, 3. Sudan, 4. Niger, 5. Iraq, 6. Uzbekistan, 7. Pakistan, 8. Egypt, 9. Turkmenistan and 10. Syria.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Egypt, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, Iceland, India, Iraq, Mauretania, New Zealand, Niger, Nile, Norway, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, UK, Uzbekistan
admin June 25th, 2010
If you keep your eyes open for these things, around the world there are regular small-scale disasters that show the impacts of global warming and climate change. Here in the UK it can be something as simple (as apparently silly?) as drought orders being applied for in north-west England just a few months after catastrophic floods.
On a larger scale, north-eastern Brazil has been hit by torrential floods which have left more than 40,000 people without shelter following the bursting of a river dam.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, UK
admin June 9th, 2010
Water is one of the planet’s great Commons, and ‘Tackling the World Water Crisis’, which is available here is the latest contribution to a rapidly growing literature looking at the threat of water shortages as the world’s population grows and our water use grows exponentially.
Published by the Foreign Policy Centre, it is a collection of articles by politicians such as new Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU foreign minister Baroness Catherine Ashton, journalists from the BBC and the Financial Times, leaders of NGOs like ActionAid and WWF-UK, plus assorted academics and think-tank heads.
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Tags: ActionAid, Bangladesh, BBC, China, Climate change, Financial Times, Ganges, Global warming, Himalaya, India, Mekong, natural disasters, Nile, Peru, Sahel, WWF, Yemen
admin May 24th, 2010
The problems of managing the waters of the Nile, which we wrote about here recently pale into insignificance when you consider the problems of managing the waters that flow down from Hindu-Kush Himalaya region (HKH). Advance Aid was at the House of Lords in London last week for the launch of a report on the waters of the HKH titled ‘The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of threat, sources of survival’.
One fifth of humanity is sustained by the waters that flow down from the HKH, including some or all of the populations of the most populous countries on earth – Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan. And it is the source of ten major Asian river systems, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong and Yellow rivers. As the report says, these drainage basins are “one of the world’s most complex and intensive risk hotspots. This water system could be involved in future crises concerning dams, river diversions, floods, water shortages and contamination”.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, India, Kings College London, natural disasters, Pakistan, UCL
admin May 19th, 2010
At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s. This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million. Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.
Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN
admin April 19th, 2010
In the wake of the perceived failure of COP-15 in Copenhagen in December last year, today sees the opening of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. This is taking place in Cochabamba in Bolivia and runs to April 22nd. Full details are here.
‘The defence of Mother Earth’ has been championed by Bolivian President Evo Morales, and the World People’s Conference lists 241partners – grassroots and indigenous movements, non-governmental organisations, activists and intellectuals – who are calling for a charter of rights for the planet.
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Tags: Bolivia, Climate change, Copenhagen, Global warming
admin December 30th, 2009
The number of natural disasters in 2009 was above the long-term average, with 850 being recorded by insurance giant Munich Re. This compares with an average over the past ten years of 770 natural disasters a year. But the death toll from these disasters in 2009 was relatively low.
Munich Re, though, is as interested in the economic losses caused as the total number of disasters, and this number was down – economic losses in the year came to $50bn and insured losses of $22bn compared with economic losses of $200bn and insured losses of $50bn in 2008.
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Tags: Climate change, Copenhagen, Indonesia, Munich Re, natural disasters, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam
admin December 19th, 2009
The failure of COP15 at Copenhagen was sadly both predictable and predicted. And it clearly was a failure, whatever spin is being put upon it by the UN or Northern governments.
And how ironic that within two months of Commons specialist Elinor Ostrom being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in Oslo that Copenhagen should be the scene of such a catastrophic example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
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Tags: China, Climate change, Copenhagen, Maldives, Ostrom, Tragedy of the Commons, UN