June 06, 2016

Introducing the SWIFT Tool for Environmental Assessment and Risk Screening for Rural Water Supply

June 06, 2016

Toward Resilience A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation is an introductory resource for staff of development and humanitarian organizations working with people whose lives and rights are threatened by disasters and climate change.

 

November 29, 2015

Climate change & human health: Impact & adaptation issues for New Zealand

May 30, 2010

Media Coverage of Climate Change in Non industrialised Countries

Climate change demands both political and personal responses in all parts of the world, and effective decision making at both scales will depend on timely, accurate information. The quality and quantity of journalism about climate change will there- fore be key in the coming years. Much has been written in this book and elsewhere about how the media reports on climate change in industrialised countries such as the United States and United Kingdom?and how this is changing

May 27, 2010

Development and Climate Change: A Mainstreaming Approach for Assessing Economic, Social, and Environmental Impacts of Adaptation Measures

The paper introduces the so-called climate change mainstreaming approach, where vulnerability and adaptation measures are assessed in the context of general development policy objectives. The approach is based on the application of a limited set of indicators. These indicators are selected as representatives of focal development policy objectives, and a stepwise approach for addressing climate change impacts, development linkages, and the economic, social and environmental dimensions related to vulnerability and adaptation are introduced. Within this context it is illustrated using three case studies how development policy indicators in practice can be used to assess climate change impacts and adaptation measures based on three case studies, namely a road project in ?ood prone areas of Mozambique, rainwater harvesting in the agricultural sector in Tanzania and malaria protection in Tanzania. The conclusions of the paper con?rm that climate risks can be reduced at relatively low costs, but the uncertainty is still remaining about some of the wider development impacts of implementing climate change adaptation measures.

May 27, 2010

Adaptation To Climate Change In Developing Countries

Adaptation to climate change is given increasing international attention as the confidence in climate change projections is getting higher. Developing countries have specific needs for adaptation due to high vulnerabilities, and they will in this way carry a great part of the global costs of climate change although the rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are mainly the responsibility of industrialized countries. This article provides a status of climate change adaptation in developing countries. An overview of observed and projected climate change is given, and recent literature on impacs, vulnerability, and adaptation are reviewed, including the emerging focus on mainstreaming of climate change and adaptation in development plan and programs. The article also serves as an introduction to seven research articles of this special issue on climate change adaptation in developing countries. It is concluded that although many useful steps have been taken in the direction of ensuring adequate adaptation in developing countries, much work still remainsto fully understand the drivers of past adaptation efforts, the need for future adaptation, and how to mainstream climate into general development policies.

May 27, 2010

How The Asian Development Bank Finances Climate Change

Friends of the earth international is the world's largest grassroots environmental network, uniting more than 77 diverse national member groups and some 5.000 loyal activist groups in every continent. Wih approximately 2 million members and supporters around the world, we campaign on today most urgent social and environmental issues. We challenge the current model of economic and corporate globalization, and promote solutions that will help to create environmentally sustainable and socially just societies.

May 27, 2010

A Brief History Of Climate Change

As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black traces key milestones, scientific discoveries, technical innovations and political action.

May 27, 2010

Assessing the Impacts of Future Climate Change on Protected Area Networks: A Method to Simulate Individual Species' Responses

Global climate change, along with continued habitat loss and fragmentation, is now recognized as being a major threat to future biodiversity. There is a very real threat to species, arising from the need to shift their ranges in the future to track regions of suitable climate. The Important Bird Area (IBA) network is a series of sites designed to conserve avian diversity in the face of current threats from factors such as habitat loss and fragmentation. However, in common with other networks, the IBA network is based on the assumption that the climate will remain unchanged in the future. In this article, we provide a method to simulate the occurrence of species of conservation concern in protected areas, which could be used as a ?rst-step approach to assess the potential impacts of climate change upon such species in protected areas. We use species-climate response surface models to relate the occurrence of 12 iome-restricted African species to climate data at a coarse (quarter degree-degree latitude-longitude) resolution and then intersect the grid model output with IBA outlines to simulate the occurrence of the species in South African IBAs. Our results demonstrate that this relatively simple technique provides good simulations of current species' occurrence in protected areas

May 27, 2010

Farmers' Perceptions of Climate Change and Agricultural Adaptation Strategies in Rural Sahel

Farmers in the Sahel have always been facing climatic variability at intra- and inter-annual and decadal time scales. While coping and adaptation strategies have traditionally included crop diversi?cation, mobility, livelihood diversi?cation, and migration, singling out climate as a direct driver of changes is not so simple. Using focus group interviews and a household survey, this study analyzes the perceptions of climate change and the strategies for coping and adaptation by sedentary farmers in the savanna zone of central Senegal. Households are aware of climate variability and identify wind and occasional excess rainfall as the most destructive climate factors. Households attribute poor livestock health, reduced crop yields and arrange of other problems to climate factors, especially wind. However, when questions on land use and livelihood change are not asked directly in a climate context, households and groups assign economic, political, and social rather than climate factors as the main reasons for change. It is concluded that the communities studied have a high awareness of climate issues, but climatic narratives are likely to in?uence responses when questions mention climate. Change in land use and livelihood strategies is driven by adaptation to a range of factors of which climate appears not to be the most important. Implications for policy-making on agricultural and economic development will be to focus on providing ?exible options rather than speci?c solutions to uncertain climate.