Environmental health experts are gathering at the Carter Center in Atlanta this week to openly discuss the public health response to climate change, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled the event last month over what some said were fears of running afoul of the U.S. president.
The next four years of U.S. action – or inaction – against climate change hangs in perilous balance as Donald Trump takes the office of the presidency today. While Trump and his cabinet appointees continue to question the impact of human activity on the climate, carbon giants on the other side of the globe are taking the opportunity to reiterate their dedication – and leadership – in the fight against climate change.
In one of President Barack Obama’s final acts in office, the State Department announced on Tuesday that it had made its second installment payment of $500 million to the Green Climate Fund – which is notable because the incoming administration opposes the fund.
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.
Cooking over an open fire or with traditional cookstoves are common practices worldwide that some experts say kill millions of people every year, through indoor air pollution, and cause massive environmental impacts from natural resource depletion to climate change. This has led to an international movement to build a better, cleaner cookstove, that some say is as much contributing to the problem as it is trying to solve it.
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.
Fox News personality Sean Hannity devoted a segment of his show this week to climate change. He brought on talking heads Monica Crowley and Bill Cunningham to discuss how all the people decrying fake news are perpetuating the myth of climate change.
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.