CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change,Agriculture and Food Security Blog Story Contest 2014.
The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security(CCAFS) is calling for stories that highlight positive change in communities related to food and farming.
Five stories will be selcted from the pool of submissions, one from each of our regions – East Africa, West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America –featuring stories about people and organisations creating a positive changelinked to food and farming in their communities.
Requirements
• The stories should be 600-800 words.
• You are adviced to integrate a climate change, youth and/or gender component into your story, and base the blog on your own experiences.
• You may be a farmer yourself, or working in a youth project related to farming, or focusing on gender-issues within food and farming.
Six groups empowering women in agriculture
Although women make up at least 43 percent of the agricultural labor force worldwide, they typically lack access to education, extension services, land, and credit. Here's a look at six groups looking to give women more power in this industry.
Farmers and farmers groups, researchers and scientists, and government leaders and policy-makers from across the continent are gathered to better understand family farming in North America and to agree upon common recommendations for the development and support of family farmers in the United States and Mexico. The Dialogue also hopes to identify the key challenges family farmers face as well as the solutions they’re developing in their communities.
More Action Needed on Reproductive Rights for All
Twenty years ago the world took an important step in agreeing that population is not just about measuring the numbers of people in the world, it is about the quality of lives of individuals and that every person counts. At the heart of this agreement was the recognition that gender equality should be a global priority, and that making decisions over your own body is a human right. Significantly this included the rights of women and girls to make decisions about their reproductive life free of discrimination, coercion and violence.
Sub-Saharan African Countries to Miss UN Sanitation Goal – Study
A new study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine finds that no sub-Saharan African country will meet the U.N. Millennium Development goal for sanitation, and that many are lagging behind achieving the target for clean drinking water as well.
According to a joint report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF last year, more than 2 billion people - or one-third of the world’s population - will remain without access to improved sanitation by 2015. The Millennium goal calls for cutting in half the number of people who lacked clean toileting facilities in 1990.
South Africa: Water Scarcity In Africa Should Get More Airtime On Government And Business Agendas
Despite the World Bank reporting that the African continent only uses 2 percent of its water resources, compared to the global average of 5 percent, it remains a fact that water is a scarce resource on most of the continent. Inaccessibility to water in Africa, as well as insufficient models for sustainable management, will present ever-increasing challenges in the future if not addressed.
By 2030, it's said that half of the world's population will live in a water-stressed environment. As economies continue to develop, the trend towards urban dwelling will rise, with people choosing to locate to more built-up centres in search of better life opportunities and employment. Where water is already a scarce resource, as it is in large parts of Africa, rapid urbanisation will necessitate a close look at accessibility, delivery and the infrastructure required to meet growing urban population needs.
Gendering Agriculture
Women spearhead efforts to feed the continent
Do land, seeds and crops have a gender? Perhaps they do in sub-Saharan Africa, where women produce up to 80% of foodstuffs for household consumption and sale in local markets, according to a report by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). For crops such as rice, wheat and maize, make up about 90% of food consumed by rural dwellers, it is women who mostly sow the seeds, do the weeding, cultivate and harvest the crops and sell surpluses.
And for secondary crops such as legumes and vegetables, says the FAO, “Women’s contribution…is even greater,” adding that it’s as if only women are involved in producing these crops. What’s more, they make and tend the gardens that provide much-needed nutritional and economic well-being.
A United Front in the War for Wildlife
In a recent article, "Prince William will need new ideas to tackle wildlife crisis," Oxford University conservationist Paul Jepson critiques the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, hosted in February 2014 by the UK Government and the Prince of Wales. Jepson's narrative deserves comment due to some misconceptions he puts forth, including confusion over the intent and substance of the London Conference and of a related but separate scientific meeting that was hosted by the Zoological Society of London the same week, the United for Wildlife (UfW) International Wildlife Trafficking Symposium.
Formalise non-state stakeholder participation in extractive industries – UNU-INRA
Formalising the interactions between non-state stakeholders and public agencies for collaborative governance could help in addressing some of the challenging issues in Africa’s extractive industries.
This, according to a book released by the United Nations University- Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), could play an instrumental role in enhancing the operations and the management of extractive resources for Africa’s development.
The book, entitled “Collaborative Governance in Extractive Industries in Africa”, urges leaders in Africa’s extractive industries to institutionalise a governance system that is transparent, inclusive and accountable in order to improve transparency, equity and efficiency in the management of revenues from the industries. Collaborative governance, the book indicates, will also promote a common understanding of the environmental and socio-economic challenges associated with the extractive industries. It also suggests that with formalised arrangements, non-state stakeholders could easily have access to relevant information, including financial statements, public expenditures and other disbursements without resorting to conflicts.
Climate change a problem today - not tomorrow - for food security, experts say
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Climate change has already had a powerful negative effect on agriculture and food security for the world’s most vulnerable, and that impact will get worse, according to agricultural experts responding to the latestIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report at a conference in London.
Pramod Aggrawal, an IPCC author and reviewer, said scientific data on agriculture over the last three decades shows that “indeed some impacts (are) already happening in terms of food security. It’s not a problem of the future anymore.”
Congo (DR) conflict
Democratic Republic of Congo's five-year war officially ended in 2003, but the country is still regularly listed as the site of one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Insecurity continues in the remote, resource-rich provinces near the eastern border, and the world's largest peacekeeping mission – a U.N. force of nearly 20,000 soldiers – struggles to prevent violence and protect the population of 67.7 million.
Why reinventing the toilet is a women’s and girls’ issue
Earlier this year, a 13-year-old girl left her parents’ home in Kanpur, India in the late hours of the night and never returned. The next day, her body was found naked, with broken limbs. She had been raped and murdered. The girl hadn’t left home on a late night adventure, to meet up with friends or go to a party. She had left because there was no toilet at home, and her only option for relief was to go outside.
This incident, while truly horrifying, is far from isolated. In the Indian state of Bihar, for example, where almost 70 percent of rural households have no access to a toilet, most cases of rape of women and girls happen when they are forced to defecate out in the open. There is a lot of work to be done to get at the root causes of endemic violence against women, but in the meantime there are concrete things we can do now to help, like address the global sanitation crisis.
Tackling Energy Poverty with Renewables?
As economies and populations grow, standards of living improve for billions of people, and with it the need for energy continues to rise. Or as World Bank Group President Dr. Jim Yong Kim put it “energy is a critical part of boosting prosperity and eradicating poverty.” The world’s center of gravity is shifting more and more toward emerging markets where primary energy consumption is expected to mirror the growth in global population. Across the world, almost 1.3 billion people still do not have access to modern sources of energy and use kerosene lamps and other hazardous and polluting alternatives for lighting such as solid fuels. It is this lack of access to modern energy services that defines ‘energy poverty’.
According to the most recent estimate from the IEA, 18% of the global population lacked access to electricity in 2011. In this regard, the IEA explains that “while the number of those without electricity declined by 9 million from the previous year, the global population increased by about 76 million in 2011, (…) to top 7 billion.” Most importantly, the relatively modest decline in those lacking access to electricity is skewed by the fact that in many affected regions energy poverty stagnated at best as population growth outstripped improvements in access to electricity.
Tanzania environmental threats and opportunities assessment
Purpose of the ETOA
The main objectives of this Environmental Threats and Opportunities Assessment (ETOA) were
to:
summarize the current state of Tanzania’s biological diversity, forests, and environment;
describe the direct biophysical threats to Tanzania’s biodiversity, forests, and
environment, and identify the causes of those threats;
identify actions needed to reduce and/or mitigate the causes of those threats in the current
political, economic, and social context;
identify any actions proposed by USAID-Tanzania that could threaten biodiversity,
forests, or environmental integrity and resilience, and
identify opportunities for USAID-Tanzania to support the needed actions within its
proposed Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) and planned programs.
This assessment fulfills a legal requirement of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), which requires
that a Tropical Forests and Biodiversity analysis be conducted in conjunction with the
development of new U.S. foreign assistance strategies and programs. It is also intended to
identify opportunities to better integrate the Mission’s portfolio across development sectors by
suggesting linkages with agriculture, democracy and governance, economic growth, health, and
education activities. Finally, it will note any possible environmental compliance problems the
Mission might face under FAA Section 117 or Regulation 22 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)
216 if they develop a strategy that involves activities that might either directly or indirectly
threaten biodiversity, tropical forests, or the natural environment.
GUINEA ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES ASSESSMENT
Threats to Biodiversity and Tropical Forests
In the broadest sense, the threats to biodiversity and forests identified in the Guinea Biodiversity and Tropical Forests 118/119 report of 2007 remain. This was confirmed with nearly everyone
interviewed during the ETOA team’s two weeks of field visits and meetings. Documents
reviewed by the assessment team similarly point to increasing threats to the environment and
natural resources in Guinea that touch nearly all sectors including health, governance, and
agriculture.
Reliable data, data collection and data storage/sharing remains a substantial hurdle to ensuring
proper science-based monitoring of the threats to biodiversity and tropical forests in Guinea.
Additionally, the minimal amount of information gathering and sharing has resulted in
challenges of sharing and scaling up of successes and lessons learned in the numerous efforts
being promulgated by international, national, and local level actors in the environment and
natural resource management field throughout the country. Building capacity to gather and share
more reliable data, the Program in Environmental Governance in Guinea for Capacity Building
and Biodiversity Conservation (PEGG) has developed forums on environmental issues to begin
dialogue amongst stakeholders in the country so as to bridge this gap. Its use of the FRAME
web platform provides a transparent, participatory, low-cost option for dialogue in the interim.
Other international donors are also working to address this shortcoming. The Government of
Guinea (GoG) is working with the EU and the African Development Bank to formalize and
enhance the collection and dissemination of environmental statistics, a basic necessity for
decision-making on environmental issues. This will likely prove to be an important opportunity
for the GoG to address the threat discussed here.
The mining sector is one of the major threats to biodiversity and tropical forests and the
overarching natural environment in Guinea. Although no new concession permits have been
granted since the installation of the new government in 2011, substantial increases in concession
permits have been granted since the Guinea Biodiversity and Tropical Forests 118/119 report of
2007. Most of the territory of the Republic is covered by one type of mining concession or
another. A 700 km rail line is planned that will further fragment substantial parts of the habitats
that host important biological resources in the country. In addition to the threats from habitat
destruction and fragmentation that will accompany strip-mining operations and from the
construction of rights of way to move the product, numerous ports are also planned. This
additional construction jeopardizes coastal and marine habitats. Mining threats loom large and
will become ever more persistent as the global economy improves and Guinea’s political
situation becomes more stable. Only one new mining operation (near Forécariah) has come into
production since the 2007 report.
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADZ793.pdf
A unifying view of climate change in the Sahel linking intra-seasonal, interannual and longer time scales
We propose a re-interpretation of the oceanic influence on the climate of the African Sahel that is
consistent across observations, 20th century simulations and 21st century projections, and that resolves
the uncertainty in projections of precipitation change in this region: continued warming of the global
tropical oceans increases the threshold for convection, potentially drying tropical land, but this ‘upped
ante’ can be met if sufficient moisture is supplied in monsoon flow. In this framework, the reversal to
warming of the subtropical North Atlantic, which is now out-pacing warming of the global tropical
oceans, provides that moisture, and explains the partial recovery in precipitation since persistent
drought in the 1970s and 1980s. We find this recovery to result from increases in daily rainfall intensity,
rather than in frequency, most evidently so in Senegal, the westernmost among the three Sahelian
countries analyzed. Continuation of these observed trends is consistent with projections for an overall
wetter Sahel, but more variable precipitation on all time scales, from intra-seasonal to multi-decadal.
Keywords: regional climate change, precipitation projections, Sahel, drought, character of
precipitation, daily precipitation, frequency of precipitation, intensity of precipitation, Senegal, Burkina
Faso, Niger
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