By Soumya Sarkar8 March 2017 (The Third Pole) – “The water rushed in at night,” recalls Madan Mohan Pal of Hendalketki in Sagar Island. “By the morning, the entire village was under water. When the flood receded, the land was so saline that we could grow nothing for the next two years.” Although Pal has […]
CAIRO, 9 March 2017 (FAO) – Access to water is a fundamental need for food security, human health and agriculture, and its looming scarcity in the North Africa and Middle East region is a huge challenge requiring an “urgent and massive response,” FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said in Cairo. Accessible fresh water in […]
By Tom Phillips; additional reporting by Wang Zhen7 March 2017 Beijing (The Guardian) – China is reportedly considering plans to build a 1,000km (620 mile) pipeline to pump water all the way from Siberia to its drought-stricken northwest. According to reports in the Chinese media, urban planners in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, have […]
Somalia, 3 March 2017 (IOM) – In order to meet the emergency needs of over a million Somalis affected by drought, IOM in Somalia is scaling up lifesaving interventions throughout the country and appealing to international donors for funding. Humanitarian agencies report worrying similarities to the 2011 famine in Somalia, in which over a quarter […]
By Lauren Markham16 February 2017 JUMAYTEPEQUE, Guatemala (Huffington Post) – Junior Dario “J.R.” Henriquez* started thinking about heading north on the long, hard migrant trail to the United States when the coffee plants started withering. Drought and a pernicious fungus called roya ― coffee rust ― were wreaking havoc on the plantation here, where […]
By Jenny Staletovich13 February 2017 SHARK RIVER (Miami Herald) – At the bottom of the Everglades along the mouth of the Shark River, a towering mangrove forest stands in a place few people outside anglers and researchers ever see: at the edge of a vast shallow bay where the salty sea and freshwater marshes conspired […]
Dubai/Rome, 13 February 2017 (United Nations) – Failure to act now to make our food systems more resilient to climate change will “seriously compromise” food production in many regions and could doom to failure international efforts to end hunger and extreme poverty by 2030, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva warned today. “Agriculture holds the […]
By Shreya Dasgupta10 February 2017 (Mongabay) – Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) declared that it was placing the rusty patched bumblebee on the U.S. endangered species list. The listing would have taken effect today, making this nearly extinct bumblebee the very first bumblebee species to be protected under the Endangered Species […]
SANA’A, 10 February 2017 (World Food Programme) – The number of food insecure people in Yemen has risen by three million in seven months, with an estimated 17.1 million people now struggling to feed themselves, according to a joint assessment by three UN agencies. Of the 17.1 million food insecure people, about 7.3 million are […]
By Amitav Ghosh and Aaron Savio Lobo31 January 2017 (The Guardian) – The Bay of Bengal’s basin contains some of the most populous regions of the earth. No less than a quarter of the world’s population is concentrated in the eight countries that border the bay1. Approximately 200 million people live along the Bay of […]
