Event, ill China Run Out Of Water? (created)
Thursday, February 19
The Earth Institute
Seminar: Columbia Water Center Seminar Series: Will China Run Out Of Water? with Chunmiao Zheng, Professor of Hydrogeology; SSPA Faculty Fellow; 2009 Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer, University of Alabama.
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Seeley W. Mudd Building, Room 924
ASIA, Mounting Costs of Climate Change Raise Fears of Conflict (created)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48679
By Ron Corben
BANGKOK, Oct 1 (IPS) - The rising challenge of climate change has raised fears of growing conflicts as the impact of more extreme weather triggers food water scarcities across the Asia region.
The concerns have added to a growing sense of urgency in the ongoing 12- day climate change talks in Bangkok, the latest in a series of negotiations that will lead to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December, where a comprehensive treaty is expected to be adopted, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.
Mark Rosegrant, a director with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, said the combination of rising food prices, water scarcity and access to land are expected to add to social pressures.
Rosegrant raised the spectre of potential instability. "It's going to be neighbours against each other," he said.
As the environment deteriorates, there could be "very significant social deterioration and the loosening of the social bonds as well," he added.
The Asia Development Bank (AsDB), in a series of new reports on climate, energy and migration released Wednesday, said food security is now threatened by falling crop yields caused by floods, droughts, erratic rainfall and other climate change impacts.
It warned that food prices could increase sharply, with staples such as rice rising by more than 30 percent, maize by over 50 percent, and wheat by as much as 100 percent over the next four decades, with South Asia expected to be the hardest hit by drought.
The AsDB said agriculture is especially vulnerable to climatic change, with over 2.2 billion people in Asia relying on agriculture for their livelihoods.
"Climate change is threatening food production systems and therefore the livelihoods and food security of billions of people who depend on agriculture in the Asia and Pacific region," the report said.
The report added that agricultural activities release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with Asia and the Pacific accounting for 37 percent of the world's total emissions from agricultural production. China alone makes up more than 18 percent of the total.
AFRICA, Trees "vital for food security" (created)
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85898
NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (IRIN) - Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry - integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors.
"How do we, in a world of more than six billion people, rising to perhaps over nine billion, feed everyone while simultaneously securing the ecosystem services such as forests and wetlands that underpin agriculture, and indeed life itself in the first place?" Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), posited at the second World Congress on Agroforestry in Nairobi.
"We can empower people - not to wait for others to do something for them - but to take the initiative, one tree at a time," Steiner said. "Trees are one of nature's most ingenious answers to many of our problems."
Agroforestry helps supply fodder, fruit and nuts as well as trees and shrubs that produce gums, resins and valuable medicines.
Steiner said agroforestry may have many roles to play in the new landscape of rewarding countries for their natural or nature-based services.
"Firstly it offers the potential for maximizing sustainable food production in the zones surrounding natural forests while also boosting biodiversity and other 'natural infrastructure'.
"Secondly, it offers an opportunity for timber production and thus alternative livelihoods to meet perhaps a supply gap that may emerge under a fully-fledged REDD [Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation] regime.
"Thirdly these agroforestry areas can also potentially secure flows from carbon finance in their own right."
UNITED NATIONS, Environmental demands grow for peacekeeping troops (created)
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/rss/2009/08/11/1
Nathanial Gronewold, staff reporter
UNITED NATIONS – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit today to Goma, a city in the heart of the war ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is meant to draw attention to renewed U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping and to press thinly stretched troops deployed there to do more to protect innocent civilians.
But how much more can overburdened peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere be expected to do? Increasingly – and controversially – they find themselves busy doing environmental cleanups, climate change mitigation projects and providing relief from natural disasters on top of their security duties.
For example, troops with MONUC – the French acronym assigned to the U.N. Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – have spent time planting trees in their area of operation, a scene repeated at other peacekeeping operations in Africa, East Timor, Lebanon and elsewhere.
...
Most famously, troops flying the blue flag spearheaded a mission last year to help Haiti recover after devastating hurricanes swept that country. The effort is largely ongoing as forces work to protect flood-prone areas and put in place stronger infrastructure.
U.N. forces have helped dig water wells to supply communities and refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, partly to make up for their own use of water. Peacekeepers have also organized agricultural projects. And the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has recently designated full-time staff at headquarters and in the field to look at ways to lighten the environmental burden inherent to hosting large military bases.
