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.
Internationally, Australia resides in the region worst affected by climate change, a so called ‘disaster alley’. Robert Sturrock from the Centre of Policy Development argues that policy action to address climate vulnerabilities in Australia and the Indo-Pacific is not sufficient, and that Australia should offer leadership to encourage regional cooperation and prepare for climate crises.
At a three-day workshop organized by the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI) and Stockholm University experts and policy actors discussed the challenges and possibilities for governing climate adaptation beyond the national level.
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.
Without concerted efforts to help small-scale farmers raise productivity and adapt to climate change, the G20 will not come close to attaining its goal of securing global food systems, argue Ruth Delzeit, Kacana Sipangule and Rainer Thiele.
The world’s 49 most climate vulnerable countries have called on the G20 to finally set a date – preferably 2020 – for a phase out of fossil fuel subsidies, in a communiqué issued at the end of its meeting in Washington.
Facing an enormous clean-up job, Peru must think about a future where flood like those in March become ever more common. In the wake of powerful rains that led to devastating floods and mudslides, Peru’s president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski says the country should expect more such devastating weather events.
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.
G7 leaders endorsed the African Risk Capacity (ARC) as a model for climate insurance. The organisation works with countries to improve their preparedness for extreme weather events and disasters.
Kenya is suffering from a devastating drought. The government has declared it a national disaster, with the Red Cross estimating 2.7 million people are in need of food aid as a result of failed rains in October, and again last month. But a lack of rainfall is not the only culprit behind the worsening water shortage.
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.