Imagine you want to compile in one book the findings about global warming as collected in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the knowledge of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) or the World Bank on the status and perspectives of human and global development. In addition, you do not want to go without the expertise of the World Resources Institute, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), or the World Health Organisation (WHO) in order to capture the global trends of today and tomorrow in a holistic way. Finally, you do not only want to cover the global trends, but also individual countries, giving specific examples. For instance: which countries will face decreases in their cereal production in 2050 and to what extent are these countries affected by malnutrition or threatened water supplies already today?

The resulting publication is not necessarily a tome of several thousand pages: one hundred pages can be enough, as the newly published "Atlas of Climate Change" shows. With more than 50 maps and graphics, Kirstin Dow and Thomas E. Downing successfully integrate an overwhelming richness of information into an overall picture that illustrates the global landscape of extreme weather events, the destruction of livelihoods, global inequity, and unequally distributed adaptive capacities in an alarming way. In times when the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights recommended to the recently established UN Human Rights Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur on the legal implications of the disappearance of states and other territories for environmental reasons, there is one place where this Atlas should be displayed: on the desk in front of the delegations in Nairobi, which come together in November to negotiate the future design of the climate change regime. (by Dennis Taenzler)

For more information, please see the press release by Earthscan Publications: http://www.earthscan.co.uk/news/pdf/PressReleaseAtlasofCC.pdf or get in touch with Gudrun Freese gudrun.freese@earthscan.co.uk

For the UN press release "Rapporteur proposed on states disappearing for environmental reasons", please see here
 

Published in: ECC-Newsletter, October 2006