ROME, 26 June 2013 (FAO) – Madagascar is in the grips of a largely uncontrolled locust plague and risks a serious food crisis. A large-scale emergency control campaign urgently requires a minimum of $22 million in funding to start in time for the next crop planting season in September. So far, FAO emergency appeals […]
28 June 2013 (Reactions) – Insurers and reinsurers have welcomed a new initiative to combat climate change, announced by President Obama early this week, which includes a proposal to convene an insurance sector group to focus on best practices and processes for assessing climate risk. The insurance market has reacted positively to the news that […]
By Trend T.Jafarov29 June 2013 Azerbaijan, Baku (Trend) – Lake Urmia’s water level has dropped by another 28 centimeters compared to the same period last year, the head of the department of water and water resources of Iran’s Ministry of Energy, Alireza Daimi said, the İRNA agency reported on Saturday. According to Daimi, the increased […]
By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Washington Bureau26 June 2013 BERLIN (McClatchy) – Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in […]
27 June 2013 (University of Melbourne) – Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found. The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record […]
By Rakteem Katakey28 June 2013 (Bloomberg) – India is burning coal in power plants at the fastest pace in 31 years. At the same time, domestic supplies of natural gas that are the main alternative are falling at the quickest rate in Asia, data from 2012 compiled by BP Plc (BP/) show. Both trends […]
By Laurie Goering28 June 2013 LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Population growth, rising affluence, water shortages, and climate change are combining to create unprecedented pressure on the world’s food supply – pressure that is likely to play out both as slow rises in hunger and as famines linked to extreme weather events, a leading agriculture […]
By Nita Bhalla; Editing by Nick Macfie26 June 2013 NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Rotting corpses contaminating water sources and poor sanitation amid devastating floods in northern India could lead to a serious outbreak of diseases such as cholera and dysentery, aid groups warned on Wednesday. The floods, triggered by heavy monsoon rains more than 10 […]
25 June 2013 NEW ORLEANS (AP) – BP is placing full-page advertisements in three of the nation’s largest newspapers on Wednesday as the company mounts an aggressive campaign to challenge what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses after its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The ad, scheduled to […]
OTTAWA, 26 June 2013 (The Economist) – One of the most divisive debates in Canada during the seven and a half years that Stephen Harper has been prime minister has been about climate change. It has pitted Mr Harper’s Conservative government and the country’s oil industry against the New Democrat and Liberal opposition parties and […]