World temperatures hit a record high for the third year in a row in 2016, creeping closer to a ceiling set for global warming with extremes including unprecedented heat in India and ice melt in the Arctic, U.S. government agencies said on Wednesday.
For this week’s Humanosphere podcast we’ll be talking about how climate risk insurance can protect the world’s poorest communities against climate risks which can cost them their livelihoods and wider development. We talk with Stewart McCulloch, global insurance director of Vision Fund, the microfinance operation of World Vision, to find out how the world’s poorest farmers can thrive and not just survive after climate shocks.
Thailand’s disaster resilience is being put to the test as unseasonably heavy rains continue to batter southern Thailand since the New Year, submerging thousands of villages in flood waters and affecting more than 1 million people with 21 dead so far, according to the U.N. and local media reports.
China’s dreaming of a clear Christmas, as the year’s worst smog has smothered 460 million people in its northern provinces since Friday and choked any talk of achieving pollution targets. Although winds are expected to clear the air by the end of the week, the government faces a fierce public fallout from the “airpocalypse.”
An indigenous political federation in the Amazon has warned the Peruvian government it will physically block any attempt by oil companies to operate on their lands.
A proposed ‘Asian Super Grid’ is attempting to pave the way for global access to “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” by 2050. Major energy companies in China, Japan, Russia and South Korea recently signed an agreement to investigate the economic and technical feasibility, but even supporters are concerned about the political feasibility.
Environmentalists have long been pushing for the use of regenerative agriculture, an alternative approach to farming they say can help the world’s poorest farmers and fight global food insecurity. Some experts say the biggest limitation of the approach may just be convincing enough of the world to adopt it.
More than 20,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes in the Dominican Republic by torrential rain and flooding, and meteorologists say another tropical storm is already on the horizon.
Each year natural disasters force as many as 26 million people back into poverty, according to a new report from the World Bank, posing a formidable challenge in the fight to end poverty. But new research shows that there is a way to help the world’s poor deal with disasters – empower women.
President-elect Donald Trump may be coal’s loudest champion, but the case for coal, especially in reducing poverty, is quickly waning. More than 120 organizations issued a statement Thursday calling on global leaders to end all forms of public support for coal expansion or to even renounce it completely in the world’s wealthiest nations.