Oxfam Report Says Global Food System Inadequate in Face of Climate Change
Oxfam, a collaboration between 17 organizations that have banded together to work at solving the issues of worldwide poverty and injustice, recently performed an analysis on "how well the world's food system is prepared for the impacts of climate change." Oxfam's analysis states that the global food system is "woefully unprepared" to deal with the challenges presented by climate change but emphasizes that "there is still time to fix the problem." Available on Oxfam's website since Tuesday, the 20-page paper titled Hot and hungry — how to stop climate change derailing the fight against hunger, made its assessments by looking at "ten key factors that influence a country's ability to feed its people in a warming world." Oxfam outlines, in each of these ten food and climate policy and practice areas, "what is happening and what is needed to protect our food systems." The report calls the difference a gap, and each area is given a score from one to 10 based on how large or small Oxfam has determined the gap to be.
NEW CHRISTIAN AID REPORT SHOWS HUMAN COST OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Christian Aid today publishes a new report showing the devastating effects of climate change, with communities worldwide, particularly in worst hit poorer countries, being forced to change their way of life.
While record-breaking floods in the UK received massive media coverage, along with broad acceptance that climate change was to blame, the voices of those suffering even greater impacts have largely gone unheard.
Using personal stories from seven different countries; Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Malawi, El Salvador, Bolivia and the Philippines, the report Taken by Storm: responding to the impacts of climate change, reveals the stark reality of life as a result of extreme weather events such as drought and flooding.
The report is intended to put a human face to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which on Monday will publish its latest report on the impacts of climate change.
Predicting future biodiversity under climate change
A new study predicts how climate change affects the productivity of key foundational species
You don't need to be a climate scientist to know that we are changing the Earth's environment and there will be consequences across the globe. But quantifying and predicting how these changes will impact human society can be difficult. More so, predicting the impact these changes will have on our natural environment in an effort to inform how best to preserve biodiversity is particularly challenging. Fortunately, a recent study is one of the first to try just that.
What did these researchers do and what did they find? They developed a model to predict future biodiversity as a result of changes to the underlying productivity of foundational tree species with global climate change. Their study drew upon many intersecting fields of study including community ecology, biogeography, and genetics. With these tools, they asked how climate change will alter the productivity of foundational species.
The definition of a foundational species was "a single species that defines much of the structure of a community by creating locally stable conditions for other species and by modulating and stabilizing fundamental ecosystem processes." These foundational species are critical members of the natural world, as they influence the local environments and provide habitat to a diverse array of communities.
In their investigation, the authors utilized genetics to create a more realistic prediction of how global climate change might influence future diversity of species. In this regard, the study was the first of its kind. The results of the analysis are widely applicable to many terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems which extend the utility of the study to the real world.
Study: Global Warming Will Harm Agriculture Sooner Than Previously Thought
THURSDAY, 27 MARCH 2014 11:25
Increased heat and water scarcity will limit food production. Farmers and food markets can adapt, but only to a point.
As hundreds of government officials and scientists huddle this week in Yokohama, Japan to polish the final draft of a major climate report, new research is revealing the depth and urgency of the puzzle the world must solve.
Growing more food in the coming decades may be increasingly difficult sooner than expected, according to a clutch of recent climate studies. Higher average temperatures, temperature spikes during the growing season, and widespread changes in rainfall and water availability will cut farmland productivity, just when an increase is most needed to feed a world on the path to 10 billion people.
Results from at least one of the studies informed the climate report to be released on March 31 in Yokohama. The report is the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body created by the United Nations in 1988 to evaluate the social and physical changes associated with a fevered Earth.
How Rhino Poaching Is Funding Terrorism (And How You Can Help Stop It)
Something 50 million years in the making is on track to be wiped out in a matter of a few decades. The rhinoceros — essentially the world's last dinosaur — is being relentlessly hunted and slaughtered for its horn. Comprised of keratin, just like your hair and fingernails, rhino horn is worth double its weight in gold at latest estimates. The horn is being used for myriad 'cures' in traditional Asian medicine, from arthritis to cancer, despite being illegal and medically useless.
South Africa is home to the world's largest remaining population of rhinos, but it is also where you'll find the greatest amount of violence against the animals, with one being killed on average about every nine hours. The white rhino species is the most abundant at 20,000+ animals, but estimates put their tipping point — at which more animals are being killed than are being born in a given year — within the next year or two.
Conservation Efforts
Thus far, few efforts have been fruitful in stopping the killing, as the prize is just too great for poachers. Conservationists and researchers are working on devising any means possible to protect the species, from poisoning living rhino's horns to using drones to spot poacher activity. Additionally, there are new efforts underway to try and reduce the length of the breeding cycle, as well as discussions about possibly synthesizing horn. Both are innovative approaches to mitigating the problem and could make some inroads.
Translocation is another approach to protecting rhinos. The government of Botswana has an initiative to restore its rhino population (which was poached out in 1992) with animals translocated from South Africa, the epicenter of today's poaching crisis. There are several African-based tourism companies with efforts in this area, including Great Plains Conservation (GPC), &Beyond, and Wilderness Safaris. The latter is planning to translocate an unspecified (due to security) number of black rhinos sometime in the first quarter of 2014, and GPC and &Beyond plan to translocate up to 100 animals in 2015 if they are able to secure funding.
Controversially, South Africa may drop out of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in order to legalize trade in rhino horn. While this is causing somewhat of an uproar, it may have merit. Horn can be harvested safely from living rhinos approximately once every three years, and South Africa has plenty of horn in storage, both from farmed rhinos and from natural deaths of animals. The real question is whether or not legalization will drive increased demand, as well as blurring the line between legal and illegal product.
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