Low-lying coastal mega-cities, many built on river deltas, are growing rapidly in terms of population and infrastructure asset value and play a pivotal role in the global economy. Global seaborne trade has more than doubled in the past 30 years and, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, the effect of a major storm on a port city [...]
Climate Change Adaptation Network (AdaptNet) has released several new publications through their listserve, one of which is Building Resilience in Practice. This briefing paper provides six case studies (Peru, Bangladesh, Sudan, Nepal and Kenya) of building resilience into development programmes. It offers a variety of entry points (disaster risk reduction, food security, natural resource management) [...]
ACT is a Canadian partner organization in the 5-year, “Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR): Building Adaptive Capacity for Managing Climate Change in Coastal Megacities” program funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) together with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social [...]
With greater climatic uncertainty over the years, there has been a concomitant increase in the intensity of floods. In the past two years alone, Thailand and Australia have witnessed egregious floods leading to population displacement, deaths, and damages upwards of USD $45 billion and $9.6 billion respectively. A number of professionals from various disciplines have [...]
The UK Government has published the country’s first ever National Climate Change Risk Assessment. DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (only in England…) demonstrated the enormous influence a national government can exert on all levels of a country’s policies by funding this extraordinary undertaking, which, in the true spirit of adaptation, will [...]
In a twist that deepens the complexities of the impacts of “global warming,” a new study featured in Science Magazine reports that the warmer-than-average summers it is causing may be linked to colder and more extreme winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The general consensus among climate scientists is that global average temperatures have been [...]
The PICS News Scan is a weekly summary of the major climate-change related science, technology, and policy advances of direct relevance to the BC provincial and Canadian federal governments and more generally to Canadian businesses, government and civil society. Download the News Scan for 13 September 2011 produced by ISIS, Sauder School of Business, University [...]
Methane, black carbon, tropospheric ozone growing climate change threats; Clean Air Task Force advocates for SLCF mitigation strategies to complement CO2 reductions On Tuesday, June 14 the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released the full text of its long-awaited report: “The Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone,” following the distribution in February of [...]
