Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
To the New York Times : “Annual monetary losses for natural disasters are expected to rise to $185 billion worldwide by the end of the century, even without factoring in the anticipated negative impacts of climate change.”
” With climate change included, the global annual losses could increase by anywhere from $28 billion to $68 billion. But governments can drastically reduce these losses and rising mortality rates (…)”
This report from the United Nations and the World Bank shows once again that acting now on protecting the environment would enable us to protect ourselves. Business as usual is a dead-end… Continue »
It seems that Pakistan is a victim of what I called global weirding earlier this month. Indeed, to the Financial Times the country is suffering from both massive floods and dramatic droughts.
To many news sources up to 20 million people have been affected by the floods. To the local government quoted by the United Nations up to six million of them are in need of food, shelter, clean water and health care.
It seems we are seeing more and more climate refugees. Indeed, after Russia and China it seems that over a billion climate refugees in 2050 is not that pessimistic…
I heard that term before as extreme events are unfolding. But two contributors of the Huffington Post believe that what we are witnessing this summer - fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, heat waves in America – is a sign of global weirding.
And they make quite a point as in a few weeks, so many weather extremes took and are taking place. Last week a glacier four times bigger than Manhattan broke off into the sea.
I send you to the complete article as I believe it is quite a must read for any responsible citizen. This shows once again it is high time to act !
India is known for planting thousands of trees in single days but it seems that Pakistan is also working on massive afforestation projects as it planted no less than 541,176 trees in 24 hours.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh is ready to invest billions in environmental protection and received $19 million from Germany and the United States for reforestation projects. Similarly Japan lent $120 million to Peru.
This is the kind of news I like the most with the ones competition in cleantech and high speed rail projects. This makes me confident that there is still hope of climate change mitigation.
The latest UNEP publication is stressing the importance of water issues in South Asia (from Iran to India and Bangladesh), a region accounting for a fourth of human population but only a twentieth of the planet’s freshwater resources.
Among the main threats are over-exploitation, pollution, high population growth and the lack of cooperation between neighboring countries. All this could become even worse with climate change (see this previous article)
Solutions – like a better management of resources – to prevent such worsening exist and here again political will is needed to apply them. Continue »
