BEIJING (Reuters) – Many Chinese wheat-growing provinces in the north seeded clouds over the weekend to help end a persistent drought and encourage the growth of winter wheat. In Shandong, one of the country’s major wheat-growing areas, jets and rockets were used to bring rain and ease the drought that had hit 800,000 hectares of […]
A new kind of refugee has arrived: Those forced from their home regions not by war or persecution, but by the climate. A Kenyan camp is bursting with the displaced, some of whom share their stories. By EDMUND SANDERS, October 27, 2009 DADAAB, Kenya: For centuries, Adam Abdi Ibrahim’s ancestors herded cattle and goats in […]
By Shaun McKinnon – Oct. 25, 2009 12:00 AMThe Arizona Republic YUMA – Along its final miles, the Colorado River snakes through a dizzying series of dams, canals, siphons and ditches, diverted to hundreds of users in Arizona and California until barely a trickle remains. What flows through this watery Grand Central Station could fill […]
By Staff Writers, Addis Ababa (AFP) Oct 22, 2009 Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation. State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth […]
Visiting a semi-arid region of Uganda where the economic and environmental effects of climate change have been added to humanitarian needs and chronic under-development, the top United Nations emergency relief official today saw first-hand an area of potential conflict over increasingly shrinking resources. “They are living on the edge, daily facing the biggest challenges we […]
By Ben Arnoldy | The Christian Science Monitor, Oct 22, 2009 Stakmo, India — Chhewang Norphel makes artificial glaciers. The reason: The real ones have rapidly receded up the Himalayan slopes in his home district of Ladakh in northernmost India. Himalayan communities like Ladakh rely on glacial runoff to grow food, making them – along […]
Royal Society wants green revolution to deal with global population rise of 3 billion By Steve Connor, Science Editor Global food production needs to be increased by between 50 and 100 per cent if widespread famine is to be avoided in the coming decades as the human population expands rapidly, leading scientists said. A second […]
This is the future of peat wetlands all over the world, wherever humans are drawing down the water table. Thousands of illegal wells were drilled around the Tablas de Daimiel wetland in Spain, a UNESCO biosphere site, to irrigate local fields. The water table fell 12 meters (40 ft), the underground peat dried out, and […]
Technorati Tags: drought,agriculture,heat wave
• Less than 1% of Tablas de Daimiel remains as lagoons• Fires burning underground as illegal wells dry out peat By Giles Tremlett, in Madrid The EU has begun an investigation into a unique Spanish wetland park that is being devastated by underground fires. Local officials have admitted that mismanaged water resources at the […]
