UNFCCC Bonn water and climate change session
10/06/11 05:53
Side Event at the climate change conference in Bonn: Water, Climate and Development: Towards COP 17
Time: 13 June 2011, Monday, 18:15-19:45 pm Place: Room METRO (MoT)
To meet the commitments related to water resources in the Convention and the Cancun Agreements, concrete actions by the Parties are urgently required. The projected impacts of water related hazards due to climate change include: sea level
rise; melting of snow and ice; changes in the frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts; and changes to ecosystems and biodiversity patterns.
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Time: 13 June 2011, Monday, 18:15-19:45 pm Place: Room METRO (MoT)
To meet the commitments related to water resources in the Convention and the Cancun Agreements, concrete actions by the Parties are urgently required. The projected impacts of water related hazards due to climate change include: sea level
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African freshwaters: emerging threats and challenges
09/06/11 11:28
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"Blue Carbon" and marine wetlands: New guidelines, methodology
09/06/11 10:10
Blue carbon is the term of art for a movement to store carbon that has been removed from the atmosphere in wetlands sediments. The idea is simple, largely borrowed from the forest carbon movement (often called REDD or REDD+ or even RED++). In a perfect world, using ecosystems to store carbon is an elegant solution to combine climate change mitigation (greenhouse gas atmospheric concentration) and climate change adaptation (managing responses to climate change impacts) approaches. You could save species, ecosystems, and often livelihoods and communities by protecting natural carbon storage mechanisms. But the issue is complicated and associated with a lot of specialized language. And because the climate is shifting and ecosystems are evolving in response, there are likely to be complicated feedback mechanisms that might end up damaging those pools of carbon and releasing greenhouse gases you thought had been locked up. And in effect your storage system might have made the global problem worse.
Thus, although the Ramsar Convention (see below) and IUCN have just put together a methodology for supporting blue carbon storage and sequestration, the technical aspects are far from settled. Read More...
Thus, although the Ramsar Convention (see below) and IUCN have just put together a methodology for supporting blue carbon storage and sequestration, the technical aspects are far from settled. Read More...
UNFCCC update from Bonn: Substance in the SBSTA?
09/06/11 09:46
Recent entries here have described a process which has been in preparation for some time but is now, finally, under active debate in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): the development of a coherent “water program” under a group called the SBSTA to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation activities. Background entries can be found here and here.
Alex Simalabwi is the UNFCCC negotiator at the Global Water Partnership and he was a fellow rapporteur on the “coping with climate change” theme last year at Stockholm World Water Week (you can see us pictured together in the report we put together). Alex is now in Bonn at the UNFCCC meeting and has been sending reports to a small group of colleagues about the SBSTA meetings over recent days.
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Alex Simalabwi is the UNFCCC negotiator at the Global Water Partnership and he was a fellow rapporteur on the “coping with climate change” theme last year at Stockholm World Water Week (you can see us pictured together in the report we put together). Alex is now in Bonn at the UNFCCC meeting and has been sending reports to a small group of colleagues about the SBSTA meetings over recent days.
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Not for the "Future of Water"? The role of widespread groundwater pollution
06/06/11 10:41
Anna Lappe from the Small Planet Institute was asked to submit a video the Future of Water event described in an earlier post (below, and to be broadcast here tomorrow, June 7). She had a bad experience with the event’s sponsor, Dow Chemical. In her words, “My contribution, which raised concerns about the threats to water sustainability from toxins in our environment, was rejected by 4goodmedia on the grounds that this should be a ‘positive, inclusive discussion.’ While I, too, believe in the principles of inclusiveness and engagement, I feel strongly we must pursue those principles in an honest context, including with full knowledge of water sustainability in relationship to Dow. For that reason, I felt it would disingenuous to engage in this conversation without pointing out the direct relationship between Dow’s core business products—a source of its $8 billion in profit last year—and toxins polluting groundwater across the United States and around the world.”
In fairness to Anna, I asked for (and obtained) her permission to post her video on this site after I was contacted by her. And in full disclosure, I was interviewed and presumably my video will be shown tomorrow, and I suggested several other people who might be interviewed for the event. While I do not agree with much that Dow Chemical has done in the past or is doing now as company policy, I felt that it was personally ethical to participate in this event. Good people can disagree over some issues. And I suspect that upon viewing this video you can see why Dow and the event’s producer would decide not to include it. That also doesn’t mean that the issues are not important or worth discussing, hence my own decision to include her video here. Read More...
In fairness to Anna, I asked for (and obtained) her permission to post her video on this site after I was contacted by her. And in full disclosure, I was interviewed and presumably my video will be shown tomorrow, and I suggested several other people who might be interviewed for the event. While I do not agree with much that Dow Chemical has done in the past or is doing now as company policy, I felt that it was personally ethical to participate in this event. Good people can disagree over some issues. And I suspect that upon viewing this video you can see why Dow and the event’s producer would decide not to include it. That also doesn’t mean that the issues are not important or worth discussing, hence my own decision to include her video here. Read More...
China's Great Diversion
02/06/11 07:09
CCW.org and ClimatePrep.org interview Jared Diamond: Where do we go from here?
01/06/11 15:31
Last October, my friend and colleague Eliot Levine from ClimatePrep.org and I sat down and talked with world-renowned conservation biologist Jared Diamond and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse (as well as many other publications) and asked him to look forward in time: how do we cope with the coming climate change impacts globally? What kinds of choices do we face? What risks do we face? Our questions to Diamond focused on finding the emerging issues that we in the developed world, the developing world, and all humans globally face as we move forward.
Given who was interviewing him and the scope of the issues we were discussing, Diamond prominently mentions water as a fundamental adaptation problem. Our discussion lasted about an hour and a half and was both wide ranging and rich. Hence a length of 11 minutes.
Given who was interviewing him and the scope of the issues we were discussing, Diamond prominently mentions water as a fundamental adaptation problem. Our discussion lasted about an hour and a half and was both wide ranging and rich. Hence a length of 11 minutes.
