What happens when habitable land is lost? What can be done to alleviate the consequences? Fred Carver, Head of Policy at UNA-UK, speaks of droughts, desertification and soil loss in the Sahara and Sahel, and how it relates to peacekeeping operations.
As climate change drives more people from rural to urban settings, how will already fragile cities cope? What must be done to ensure that all cities are safe, sustainable places to live?
After cyclone Aila hit the coast of Bangladesh in 2009, migration has become the only option for many families whose livelihoods where impaired by the resulting floodings. In this special report, personal stories from Khulna give an insight into how vulnerable populations are affected by climate impacts.
Adaptation Futures 2018 provides an opportunity for international networking and dialogue with more than 1000 participants from academia, government, civil society and business, all aiming to take climate adaptation forward.
Climate-related risks are increasingly recognised as a key factor – and at times a key driver – of human insecurity and even conflict. Understanding the linkages between climate and security is essential for decision-makers and practitioners to develop and implement risk-reducing, conflict preventive and sustainable policies and approaches to climate-related risks. The Planetary Security Initiative (PSI) is the institutional home of these efforts.
Climate change will have a devastating impact on millions of people, threatening housing and agriculture. But it carries a terrible cost in terms of culture and tradition too. The young journalists and photographers hope to capture something of these cultures before they are lost for ever.
The war in Darfur, Sudan, is frequently cited as a classic example of a 'climate conflict’. In North Darfur, a project of UN Environment and its partners has now won the Land for Life Award. The project seeks solutions to address climate-fragility risks through the sustainable management of dryland areas, improving food security and increasing disaster resilience in communities which livelihoods are directly affected by climate change.
The world’s most extensive humanitarian crisis is currently playing out in the Lake Chad region, with some 17 million people affected, and 7 million suffering food insecurity. We spoke with Ambassador Hinrich Thölken, Permanent Representative of Germany to FAO, WFP and IFAD, who travelled to both Nigeria and Chad to gain a better understanding of the different compound pressures.
Resilience is a widely used concept among development, environmental, security and peacebuilding organisations. However, it has rarely been applied together with the concept of environmental security, despite the obvious ways in which the concepts complement each other. These concepts can be jointly applied in the peacebuilding sector. Environmental security sharpens the scope of resilience, while resilience allows for taking issues into account that a traditional environmental security perspective might miss.
As the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction soon gets underway, the world is witnessing the highest levels of famine risk in decades. While war and conflict stand as a major root cause of the crisis in the Middle East and Africa, climate change is a key “enhancer” of the humanitarian crisis unfolding before our eyes.
On 4-5th May, adelphi was at the Resilient Cities Congress 2017 in Bonn to speak on a panel on ‘Violence and Climate Change in Cities’. The session was a unique and much required discussion on the interactions between climate change and conflict in urban settings.
The European Union is preparing a new Communication on resilience. This concept has played an important role in the EU’s approach to the development-humanitarian nexus but has evolved over the past years. Resilience is now set up to play a key role in EU external action since the publication of the EU Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy. In this blog, Volker Hauck casts light on the term and its implications for EU external action in facing situations of fragility and protracted crisis.
Climate scientists from several international agencies were ending a three-day conference in Nairobi, releasing a detailed study of the Kenyan drought whose main message is: prepare for more. Humanitarians need to understand climate risks and use climate information to mitigate such disasters.
An official report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) finds that climate change poses increasingly severe risks for ecosystems, human health, the economy and security in Europe. Hans-Martin Füssel, EEA Project Manager, summarizes the takeaways and explains how to apply the findings.
Cities are already facing the brunt of a range of interacting risks from criminal violence, terrorism and war to demographic pressures, to climate and environmental change. Coastal megacities are especially at risk given the specific impacts of climate change they face, such as sea-level rise, increased storm frequency and severity, and destruction to infrastructure such as ports, rail and road networks. These risks are amplified as urban populations become ever larger.