European peatlands could turn from carbon sinks to sources as a quarter have reached levels of dryness unsurpassed in a record stretching back 2,000 years, according to a new study. This trend of “widespread” and “substantial” drying corresponds to recent climate change, both natural and human-caused, but may also be exacerbated by the peatlands being used for agriculture and fuel.
As global temperatures rise, warmer air and oceans are expected to fuel stronger hurricanes, with dangerous consequences.
Climate change, civil conflict, and violent extremism are among the most significant threats to global human development, peace, and security. UN-led plans to address all three require immediate action to prevent future crises, yet crucial investments may not yield tangible results for years to come—well beyond democratic term limits. Jonathan Rozen reflects on tensions between long-term planning and short-term action.
While diplomats in Bonn work on the operating manual for the Paris Agreement, Washington ponders withdrawing from climate action.
The Climate Diplomacy platform has been dedicated to monitoring and supporting the climate debate, by gathering and promoting stories, which touch on different aspects of climate diplomacy. Thus, to end the year on a positive note and maintain the motivation for 2017, we’ve complied our top ten climate diplomacy stories published on our platform over the past year.
This article finds evidence that “risk of armed-conflict outbreak is enhanced by climate related disaster occurrence in ethnically fractionalized countries”. The authors state that while each conflict is the result of a very context-specific mixture of factors, natural disasters triggered by anthropogenic climate change might act as a threat multiplier.
For the abstract and full article please see here.
5 July 2012 - More than half of Liberia's forests have been granted to logging firms, bypassing environmental laws and with few benefits to the people