An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes
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in terrestrial ecosystems
As more frequent droughts and floods threaten the global food supply, humans are increasing their demands on water and land, The New York Times reports.
Data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report:
• 500 million people are living in areas that are becoming desert.
• Soil is depleted at 10X-100X the rate it’s being formed.
• More than 10% of the global population is undernourished.
Major threats include the risk of “multi-breadbasket failure”—simultaneous food crises on several continents—and migration triggered by food shortages.
Good News/Bad News: Catastrophe can be avoided, but it would require massive changes to agriculture, food systems and behavior.
A Key Action: Eat less meat. Cattle production is driving deforestation, consuming huge amounts of water, generating methane and causing other impacts, notes Nature.
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Overview.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest crisis facing the world, but unless humans release their grip
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on nature, it won’t be the last, according to a new report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which includes a new experimental index on human progress that takes into account countries’ carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint.
The report lays out a stark choice for world leaders - take bold steps to reduce the immense pressure that is being exerted on the environment and the natural world, or humanity’s progress will stall.
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The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) fulfills that mandate in two volumes. This report, Volume II, draws on
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the foundational science described in Volume I, the Climate Science Special Report (CSSR).2 Volume II focuses on the human welfare, societal, and environmental elements of climate change and variability for 10 regions and 18 national topics, with particular attention paid to observed and projected risks, impacts, consideration of risk reduction, and implications under different mitigation pathways. Where possible, NCA4 Volume II provides examples of actions underway in communities across the United States to reduce the risks associated with climate change, increase resilience, and improve livelihoods.
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This World Migration Report 2018 is the ninth in the series. Since 2000, IOM has been producing world migration reports to contribute to increased understanding of migration throughout
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the world. This new edition presents key data and information on migration as well as thematic chapters on highly topical migration issues.
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This report aims to support countries in the necessary transition toward healthier, more sustainable diets by integrating biodiversity in food-based interventions to support nutrition and health. It is intended to help guide decision-makers in
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the health, nutrition and other sectors, to:
Consider the important role of biodiversity in food systems for the development of integrated interventions to support healthy, diverse and sustainable diets;
To focus investments and country support for more comprehensive, coordinated and cross-cutting public health and nutrition projects and policies; and
To strengthen the resilience of food systems, health systems, and societies, each of which are each increasingly compromised by widespread ecological degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Biodiversity at every level (genetic, species and ecosystem level) is a foundational pillar for food security, nutrition, and dietary quality. It is the basic source of variety in essential foods, nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and medicines, and underpins life-sustaining ecosystem services. It is a core environmental determinant of health, often a vital ingredient of healthy nutritional outcomes and livelihoods, gender equality, social equity, and other health determinants.
Biodiversity can play a more prominent role in planning for nutritional outcomes in various ways, e.g. by facilitating the production of nutritious fruits and plant products, sustaining livelihoods through more efficient production and increasing the diversity of products available in markets. This Guidance presents and expands on six core building blocks for mainstreaming biodiversity for nutrition and health:
Cross-sectoral knowledge development and knowledge co-production;
Enabling environments;
Integration;
Conservation and the wider use of biodiversity;
Education and awareness-raising;
Monitoring and evaluation;
This WHO report builds on an unprecedented opportunity to mainstream biodiversity in order to support healthy and sustainable diets, and offers the necessary technical guidance to catalyze and support a transformation of the global food system and transition to healthier, more sustainable diets.
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This guide presents a basis for understanding how diarrhoeal diseases are currently influenced by climate and weather, and may be further exacerbated by climate
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change. It is a technical guide on how to conduct a Vulnerability & Adaptation assessment for diarrhoeal diseases and climate change, and provides guidance on how to:
identify populations and regions vulnerable to diarrhoeal diseases and the reasons for their vulnerability;
establish relevant baselines that can be analysed and monitored;
conduct analyses to project how diarrhoeal diseases may be impacted in the future due to climate change; and
identify appropriate responses to mitigate and monitor these risks over time.
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Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth As
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sessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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A new brief published by the IFRC and Climate Centre today details the adverse impacts of climate
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change on human health and provides more detail on the second of four pillars of action in the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement ambitions on climate.
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This profile is part of a series of Climate Risk Country Profiles developed by the World Bank Group (WBG). The country profile
synthesizes most re
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levant data and information on climate change, disaster risk reduction, and adaptation actions and policies
at the country level. The country profile series are designed as a quick reference source for development practitioners to better
integrate climate resilience in development planning and policy making.
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The threat climate change poses to health, equity, and development has been rigorously documented. However, in an era marked by economic crisis, re
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gional conflicts, natural disasters and growing disparities between rich and poor, the joint global actions required to address climate change have been vigorously debated – and critical decisions postponed.
This document, part of WHO’s Health in the Green Economy series, describes how many climate change measures can be “win-wins” for people and the planet.
These policies yield large, immediate public health benefits while reducing the upward trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these policies can improve the health and equity of people in poor countries and assist developing countries in adapting to climate change that is already occurring, as evidenced by more extreme storms, flooding, drought and heatwaves.
WHO’s Department of Public Health and Environment launched the Health in the Green Economy initiative in 2010 to review potential health and equity “co-benefits” of proposed climate change measures – as well as relevant risks.
This review examines mitigation strategies discussed in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which constitutes the most broad-based global review of mitigation options by scientific experts.
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On the global scale, the impacts of the current food system
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on the environment are severe. The agro-industrial revolution has made it possible to increase food production at a price.
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PNAS | March 4, 2014 | vol. 111 | no. 9
Malaria is an important disease that has a global distribution and significant health burden. The spatial limits of its distribution and seasonal activity are sensitive to
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climate factors, as well as the local capacity to control the disease. Malaria is also one of the few health outcomes that has been modeled by more than one research group and can therefore facilitate the first model intercomparison for health impacts under a future with climate change. We used bias-corrected temperature and rainfall simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 climate models to compare the metrics of five statistical and dynamical malaria impact models for three future time periods (2030s, 2050s, and 2080s). We evaluated three malaria outcome metrics at global and regional levels: climate suitability, additional population at risk and additional person-months at risk across the model outputs. The malaria projections were based on five different global climate models, each run under four emission scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways, RCPs) and a single population projection. We also investigated the modeling uncertainty associated with future projections of populations at risk for malaria owing to climate change. Our findings show an overall global net increase in climate suitability and a net increase in the population at risk, but with large uncertainties. The model outputs indicate a net increase in the annual person-months at risk when comparing from RCP2.6 to RCP8.5 from the 2050s to the 2080s. The malaria outcome metrics were highly sensitive to the choice of malaria impact model, especially over the epidemic fringes of the malaria distribution.
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his profile is part of a series of Climate Risk Country Profiles developed by the World Bank Group (WBG). The country profile
synthesizes most rel
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evant data and information on climate change, disaster risk reduction, and adaptation actions and policies
at the country level. The country profile series are designed as a quick reference source for development practitioners to better
integrate climate resilience in development planning and policy making.
more
The threats posed by climate change to agriculture are now well known. Climate
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change has already resulted in a negative trend in mean crop yield per decade, and this is likely to continue as the century unfolds. In Africa, 650 million people are currently dependent on rain- fed agriculture and, despite progress in the Millennium Development Goals, food and nutrition insecurity remainunacceptably high.
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This Technical Brief focuses on appraising and prioritising options for climate resilience with a view to informing water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programme and project design.
This Tech
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nical Brief:
- provides a simple scorecard/checklist approach to use as a starting point for appraising and prioritising options, and as an awareness-raising activity - covers all aspects of WASH
- has a predominantly rural focus, to align with the rest of the Strategic Framework and Technical Briefs
- focuses on current and near future options over the next 15–20 years, which fits in with WASH programming timescales and development
- includes WASH examples to show how the approach can be applied.
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With this World Health Day, WHO is drawing attention to a group of diseases that are spread by insects and other vectors, the heavy health and economic burdens they impose, and what needs to be done to reduce these burdens. Many of these diseases ha
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ve been historically confined to distinct geographical areas, but this situation has become more fluid due to a host of ills, including climate change, intensive farming, dams, irrigation, deforestation, population movements, rapid unplanned urbanization, and phenomenal increases in international travel and trade. The control of vector-borne diseases can make a major contribution to poverty reduction, as it precisely targets the poor
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This publication presents a comprehensive methodology to support the Member States of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in preparing for and responding to heat-health risks in
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the Region of the Americas. It builds on World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization global documents, as well as on the disaster preparedness methodologies employed throughout the countries of the Region. This publication is part of an effort coordinated by PAHO to support Member States in multihazard preparedness, and includes: early warning system strengthening; threat characterization; activation and deactivation procedure definition; and institutional coordination. It engages different disciplines and recognizes the importance of intersectoral collaboration to respond to heat-health risks. It aims to bring awareness of the impacts of heat on the health of people of the Americas to public health decisionmakers, and thereby strengthen health service provision.
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WHO's Health in the Green Economy sector briefings examine the health impacts of climate change
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mitigation strategies considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Fourth Assessment Report (Climate Change, 2007). Large, immediate health benefits from some climate change strategies are to be expected.
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Top 10 hungriest countries contribute just 0.08% of global CO2.
-Climate & Food Vulnerability Index shows 10 most food insecure countries emit less than half a tonne of CO2 per person
-Burundi is
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the world's most food insecure and smallest per capita emitter
-The average Briton generates as much CO2 as 212 Burundians
-IPCC blockers Russia, USA and Saudi some of the worst offenders
As scientists of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meet in Geneva this week to publish their Special Report on Climate Change and Land (August 8), a new report by the development charity Christian Aid shows that climate change is having a disproportionate impact on the food systems of the country’s least responsible for causing the climate crisis.
The IPCC is expected to show how climate change will affect global food supply, spiking prices and reducing nutrition. It is also likely to recommend that countries will need to drastically cut emissions if global food security is to be protected.
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The world agreed to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Nine planetary boundaries set an upper limit to Earth system impacts of human activity in the long run. Conventional efforts to
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achieve the 14 socio-economic goals will raise pressure on planetary boundaries, moving the world away from the three environmental SDGs. We have created a simple model, Earth3, to measure how much environmental damage follows from achievement of the 14 socio-economic goals, and we propose an index to track effects on people’s wellbeing. Extraordinary efforts will be needed to achieve all SDGs within planetary boundaries.
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