Climate risk profile: Ethiopia
This profile provides an overview of climate risks facing Ethiopia, including how climate change will potentially impact agriculture and crop production, livestock, water resources and human health. The
Climate Impacts
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Teak forests in the changing climate scenario
Human activities over the past 250 years have caused the level of green house gases in the atmosphere to rise, thereby impeding the reflection of long wave radiation back to space. As a result, the Earth's atmosphere is warming up at an alarming pace, and leading slowly but surely to change in the climate. This is seen to be already affecting our forests in general and teak forest in particular.
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Transport and energy - The challenge of climate change
For transport, a major contributor to greenhouse gases, the challenge to reduce emissions is immense, particularly as most forecasts see transport activity doubling or tripling in the next 30 years. Fortunately, governments in the OECD area (which is where most greenhouse gases come from) are starting to act, though much more needs to be done. That is why the first International Transport Forum, to be held in Leipzig, Germany, from 28-30 May 2008, will be devoted to the theme
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Synthetic turf - Health debate takes root
In Little League dugouts, community parks, professional athletic organizations, and international soccer leagues, on college campuses and neighborhood playgrounds, even in residential yards, the question being asked is "grass or plastic?' The debate is over synthetic turf, used to blanket lawns, park spaces, and athletic fields where children and adults relax and play; the questions are whether synthetic turf is safe for human and environmental health, and whether its advantages outweigh those of natural grass.
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Lignite - Expensive and unsustainable
Germany continues to invest in brown coal mining, despite ambitious climate targets. Requirements for carbon capture and storage could eventually make the fuel unprofitable. March 2008
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The role of local institutions in adaptation to climate change
This document focuses on the role of local institutions in adaptation to climate change. It does so under the belief that climate impacts will affect disadvantaged social groups more disproportionately, and that local institutions centrally influence how different social groups gain access to and are able to use assets and resources.
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Climate change and adaptation in African agriculture
This study set out to identify and understand the extent to which, and ways in which, information from climate change models is being integrated into agricultural development practice and decision making in Africa. Adaptation to climate variability is not new, but climate change is expected to present heightened risk, new combinations of risks and potentially grave consequences.
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Impacts of climate change and variability on transportation systems and infrastructure: Gulf Coast study, Phase I
Climate affects the design, construction, safety, operations, and maintenance of transportation infrastructure and systems. The prospect of a changing climate raises critical questions regarding how alterations in temperature, precipitation, storm events, and other aspects of the climate could affect the nation's roads, airports, rail, transit systems, pipelines, ports, and waterways. Phase I of this regional assessment of climate change and its potential impacts on transportation systems addresses these questions for the region of the U.S.
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Climate change to adversely impact global fish production
Climate change could adversely impact the fish production globally, a latest report by United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP) said. The report tilted
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Stronger evidence of global warming
With more recent data on the Himalayan glaciers from the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites, scientists of the Space Applications Centre (SAC) of the Indian Space Research Organisaation (ISRO) at Ahmedabad now have much stronger evidence of the finger print of global warming in the observed alarming retreat of these glaciers. The new results were presented at the ongoing National Space Science Symposium (NSSS-2008) here by Dr. Anil V. Kulkarni of SAC. In 2004 Dr. Kulkarni and his colleagues investigated the spatial extent of 466 glaciers in the basins of Chenab, Parbati and Baspa using remote sensed data and compared them with the 1962 topographic data of the Survey of India. They found an overall reduction of 21 per cent in the glacial surface area. They had also found that the process of deglaciation had led to the fragmentation of large glaciers resulting in the reduction in the mean surface area of glacial extent from 1 sq. km. to 0.32 sq. km. during 1962-2004. The new data pertains to two additional basins of Warwan and Bhut comprising 253 and 189 glaciers respectively. Together with the earlier data on 466 glaciers, the cumulative area of these 908 Himalayan glaciers has been found to have reduced from 3391 sq. km. to 2721 sq. km., implying a total area reduction of 20 per cent. Another new finding is that the snow line
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Human shadows on world's oceans
Scientists Are Building First Worldwide Portrait Of Human Impact That Has Left Just 4% Of The Seas Pristine In 1980, after college, I joined the crew of a sailboat partway through a circumnavigation of the globe. Becalmed and roasting one day during a 21-day crossing of the western Indian Ocean, several of us dived over the side. Within a few swimming strokes, the bobbing hull seemed a toy over my shoulder as I glanced back through my diving mask. Below me, my shadow and the boat's dwindled to the vanishing point in the two-mile-deep water. Human activity seemed nothing when set against the sea itself. Just a few weeks later, on an uninhabited island in a remote part of the Red Sea, I was proved wrong. The shore above the tide line was covered with old light bulbs, apparently tossed from the endless parade of ships over the years. Now scientists are building the first worldwide portrait of such dispersed human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent. A paper in the February 15 issue of the journal Science is the first effort to map 17 kinds of human ocean impacts like organic pollution, including agricultural runoff and sewage; damage from bottomscraping trawls; and intensive traditional fishing along coral reefs. About 40% of ocean areas are strongly affected, and just 4% pristine, according to the review. Polar seas are in the pristine category, but poised for change. Some human impacts are familiar, like damage to coral reefs and mangrove forests through direct actions like construction and subtler ones like the loss of certain fish that shape ecosystems. Others were a surprise, said Benjamin S Halpern, the lead author and a scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. He said continental shelves and slopes proved to be the most heavily affected areas, particularly along densely populated coasts. The most widespread human fingerprint is a slow drop in the pH of surface waters around the world as a portion of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from fuel and forest burning each year is absorbed in water, where it forms carbonic acid. That progressive shift in ocean chemistry could eventually disrupt shell-forming plankton and reef-building species, particularly where other impacts, including rising temperatures from human-caused global warming, create simultaneous stresses, many marine biologists say. "I study this stuff all the time and didn't expect the impacts to be as pervasive as we found,' Halpern said. The review provides a baseline necessary for tracking further shifts, he said. It also identifies some unanticipated trouble spots, similar to terrestrial biodiversity "hot spots' that environmental groups have identified over the years. NYT NEWS SERVICE