By Jeremy Hance8 October 2012 (mongabay.com) – From 1990 to 2010 almost all palm oil expansion in Kalimantan came at the expense of forest cover, according to the most detailed look yet at the oil palm industry in the Indonesian state, published in Nature: Climate Change. Palm oil plantations now cover 31,640 square kilometers of […]
NIAMEY, 23 October 2012 (Reuters) – Niger said on Monday it will launch a $110 million project to counter the impact of rapid expansion of deserts and increasingly unpredictable rains in one of the world’s poorest countries. “The programme aims to test strategies that will help us integrate climate risk and adapt climate change into […]
By Gwen Ackerman 23 October 2012 The Dead Sea is shrinking at a record rate, prompting calls for Israel and Jordan to stop fertilizer makers from siphoning so much of the water whose restorative powers have attracted visitors since biblical times. The salty inland lake bordering the nations dropped a record 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) […]
22 October 2012 (Trinity College Dublin) – More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising temperatures cause rice agriculture to release more of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) for each kilogram of rice it produces, new research published recently in the online edition of Nature Climate Change reveals. “Our results show that rice agriculture […]
Inadequate access to water and sanitation also hinders progress on achieving gender equality. In most households, women and girls are the primary carriers of water, and often need to travel more than 30 minutes round trip to collect water (see Figures 1 and 2); this is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa. The resultant ‘time poverty’ […]
By Charlotte Stoddart21 October 2012 Bees, the most important pollinators of crops, are in trouble. All over the world, their populations are decreasing and scientists and farmers want to know why. In some cases, such as the widely reported colony collapses in North America in 2006, it is probably down to disease. But a blooming […]
By Emma Amaize21 October 2012 Managing the ravaging flood in Delta State has been a complicated affair for both the victims and the state government. In some camps established for the Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, in the state, 18 at the time of this report, facilities have been over-stretched. Besides, in one or two communities, […]
By John Vidal, Rebecca Smithers, and Shiv Malik 10 October 2012 (The Guardian) – The UN has warned of increasing meat and dairy prices in the wake of extreme weather in the United States and across large parts of Europe and other centres of global food production. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) […]
By George Monbiot, The Guardian 15 October 2012 I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in […]
By Felix Onuah and Tim Cocks11 October 2012 LOKOJA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday visited some of the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the country’s worst flooding in at least five decades, calling it a ‘national disaster’. Vast stretches of Africa’s most populous nation have been submerged by […]
