Achieving this aim would mean tens of billions more dollars flowing into adaptation projects. This huge – but achievable – feat would be immensely beneficial for communities around the world suffering from regular extreme weather events.

Alongside his call for greater adaptation finance, Guterres outlined five priorities for the sector, one of which was making it easier to access funding, especially for the vulnerable.

If billions are going to be spent on helping countries adapt to climate change, we need to make sure the money is reaching the people who need it the most. This is where the concept of locally led adaptation (LLA) comes in. The term refers to the central importance of providing frontline communities with the power and resources to respond to the climate crisis.

The Adaptation Fund was among the first group of international organisations to endorse a set of principles on locally led adaptation during COP25 in 2019. These principles cover everything from devolving decision-making to addressing inequalities, from providing predictable funding to ensuring the whole process is open and transparent. The principles have since been endorsed by over 100 organisations, including government ministries, global charities and development agencies.

This new model sets the scene for how current and future climate adaptation should be implemented. The focus is on an inclusive approach which puts communities most affected by climate change at the heart of how decisions are made.

Putting words into practice

The Adaptation Fund has been applying the principles of locally led adaptation for over a decade. The fund’s direct access scheme allows national organisations based in the countries they serve to manage all elements of a project, from design to monitoring.

The fund pioneered its first enhanced direct access (EDA) projects in 2014, taking direct access a step further in empowering national institutions to identify and fund local adaptation projects. This led the fund to establish an EDA funding window in 2021, and in April 2024, it went one step further by creating dedicated finance streams to support locally led adaptation.

The fund believes this new approach makes it “the first multilateral climate fund that has fully operationalised the global LLA principles,” it said in a press statement.

“The Adaptation Fund has a rich history of innovating and evolving to respond to countries’ urgent adaptation needs. Over several years, the fund has continued to offer more opportunities to vulnerable countries through diverse funding windows beyond its regular projects,” Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the organisation, told Climate Home.

“Creating these dedicated funding windows to support locally led adaptation will open even more opportunities for vulnerable countries to enhance capacity building by offering local governments, NGOs, community organisations, indigenous groups, young entrepreneurs and a broad range of local actors the opportunity to develop and implement sustainable adaptation actions directly,” he added.

Tailored solutions

One of the pioneering locally led adaptation projects the fund supported took place in South Africa from 2015 to 2020. On opposite ends of the country, two districts – Namakwa in the Northern Cape and Mopani in Limpopo – are subject to the same extreme weather: hotter temperatures with more intense dry and wet spells. These more uncertain, dangerous conditions put ever greater pressure on fragile local communities.

The pilot project was implemented by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It was intended to strengthen local institutions to adapt to these new climate realities, and provided funding to 12 ‘small grant recipients’ – groups based in the region and with an intimate understanding of how the communities work.

Investments were made after vulnerability studies were conducted and tailored solutions created to meet local needs. The ambition of these groups was simple – to ensure resources went to people most vulnerable to climate change. A raft of innovative solutions were then implemented, from rainwater harvesting and solar pumps, to cooling sheds and bio-gas digesters.

‘Considerable impact’

“The reach and positive impact on people’s livelihoods and adaptive capacity through assets, learning and networks was considerable,” the project’s evaluation report concludes, adding that the focus on careful, appropriate investment “has significantly improved the lives of those directly, and indirectly connected with the projects.”

Mandy Barnett, SANBI’s chief director for adaptation policy, told Climate Home that one lesson from the project was a need to develop trust and effective relationships with people on the ground.

“We learned what we should do and what we shouldn’t do in terms of getting climate finance to the right people,” she added, noting that communicating expectations, from the funder downward, was key.

“A wider challenge is the need to translate climate science into local concerns. We want to empower people to make informed decisions, and to do this requires you to invest time and resources into capacity building,” she added.

New opportunities

The South African project helped pave the way for the many LLA schemes the fund is now supporting around the world. Fast forward to 2024 and a range of new proposals have just been approved which puts decision-making powers into the hands of local institutions.

They include a Peruvian project to support water, agriculture and food security; a Rwandan project to build climate resilience in rural areas; and in Belize, a plan to restore ecosystems and livelihoods battered by climate-related disasters. What these projects have in common is not only a plan to fight climate change, but one where the tools and resources are under local control.

“These new LLA windows take a significant step forward in providing an opportunity to directly lead and develop adaptation projects on the ground and accelerate effective, scalable actions worldwide in the process,” said Ollikainen.

The way forward

On World Environment Day this June, the UN Secretary-General took the opportunity to speak up about adaptation finance again. He highlighted how the last 12 months have been the hottest on record. “For every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only about 5 cents is available,” he said.

The most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that, in 2022, $115.9 billion was raised for climate finance, the first time this target has been achieved. Adaptation finance made up $32.4 billion of the total, a way off the 50% goal endorsed by the UN head, but still three times higher than what it was in 2016.

Where this money is spent will determine how vulnerable regions can survive the impacts of climate change in the coming years. But as more locally led adaptation projects are rolled out, affected communities will finally have a direct say in how that happens.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Finance flowing for locally led climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the closing session of the two-week talks on Thursday evening, many countries expressed their disappointment and frustration at the lack of any outcome on the Mitigation Ambition and Implementation Work Programme (MWP), noting the urgency of stepping up efforts to curb greenhouse gas pollution this decade.

The co-chairs of the talks said those discussions had not reached any conclusion and would need to resume at the annual climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, unleashing a stream of disgruntled interventions from both developed and developing countries.

Samoa’s lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), emphasised that “we really can’t afford these failures”. “We have failed to show the world that we are responding with the purpose and urgency required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” she said.

Anne Rasmussen of Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Governments, from Latin America to Africa and Europe, lamented the lack of progress on the MWP because of its central role in keeping warming to the 1.5C temperature ceiling enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

Current policies to cut emissions are forecast to lead to warming of 2.7C, even as the world is already struggling with worsening floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels at global average temperatures around 1.3C higher than pre-industrial times.

Mitigation a taboo topic?

Despite the clear need to act fast, a deep sense of mistrust seeped into talks on the MWP in Bonn, with negotiators disagreeing fundamentally over its direction, according to sources in the room.

Developed countries and some developing ones said that the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), led primarily by Saudi Arabia and China, as well as some members of the African Group, had refused to engage constructively in the discussions.

“The reason is that they fear this would put pressure on them to keep moving away from fossil fuels,” an EU delegate told Climate Home.

Bonn bulletin: Fossil fuel transition left homeless

Bolivia’s Diego Pacheco, speaking on behalf of the LMDCs, rejected that view in the final plenary session, while describing the atmosphere in the MWP talks as “strange and shocking”. He also accused developed countries of trying to bury data showing their emissions will rise rather than fall over the course of this decade.

The EU and Switzerland said it was incomprehensible that a body charged with cutting greenhouse gas emissions had not even been allowed to discuss them.

“Mitigation must not be taboo as a topic,” said Switzerland’s negotiator, adding that otherwise the outcome and credibility of the COP29 summit would be at risk.

Rows over process

Before MWP negotiations broke down in Bonn, its co-facilitators – Kay Harrison of New Zealand and Carlos Fuller of Belize – had made a last-ditch attempt to rescue some semblance of progress.

They produced draft conclusions calling for new inputs ahead of COP29 and an informal note summarising the diverging views aired during the fraught exchanges. For many delegates, the adoption of those documents would have provided a springboard for more meaningful discussions in Baku.

But the LMDC and Arab groups refused to consider this, arguing that the co-facilitators had no mandate to produce them and calling their legitimacy into question – a claim rebutted by the UN climate secretariat, according to observers. Frantic efforts to find common ground ultimately came to nothing.

A session of the Mitigation Work Programme in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Fernanda de Carvalho, climate and energy policy head for green group WWF, said the MWP discussions must advance if the world is to collectively reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels, as scientists say is needed.

The MWP should be focused on supporting countries to deliver stronger national climate action plans (NDCs) – due by early next year – that set targets through to 2035, she said.

“Instead, we saw [government] Parties diverging way more than converging on hard discussions that never made it beyond process,” she added.

‘Collective amnesia’

Some developing countries, including the Africa Group, pushed back against what they saw as efforts by rich nations to force them to make bigger cuts in emissions while ducking their own responsibilities to move first and provide more finance to help poorer countries adopt clean energy.

Brazil – which will host the COP30 summit in 2025 – said the MWP was the main channel for the talks to be able to find solutions to put into practice the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a fair way.

But to enable that, “we have to create a safe environment of trust that will leverage it as a cooperative laboratory”, he said, instead of the “courthouse” it has become “where we accuse and judge each other”.

Observers in Bonn pointed to the absence of discussions on implementing the COP28 deal on fossil fuels, which was hailed last December as “historic”.

“It seems like we have collective amnesia,” veteran watcher Alden Meyer, a senior associate at think-tank E3G, told journalists. “We’ve forgotten that we made that agreement. It’s taboo to talk about it in these halls.”

‘Detour on the road to Baku’

After the exchange of views, UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell noted that the Bonn talks had taken “modest steps forward” on issues like the global goal on adaptation, increased transparency of climate action and fixing the rules for a new global carbon market.

“But we took a detour on the road to Baku. Too many issues were left unresolved. Too many items are still on the table,” he added.

The closing plenary of the Bonn Climate Change Conference. Photo: Lucia Vasquez / UNFCCC

Another key area where the talks failed to make much progress was on producing clear options for ministers to negotiate a new post-2025 climate finance goal, as developed countries refused to discuss dollar amounts as demanded by the Africa and Arab groups, among others.

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Developing nations also complained about this in the final session, while others expressed their concern that a separate track of the negotiations on scientific research had failed to address the topic in a rigorous enough manner.

In his closing speech, Stiell reminded countries that “we must uphold the science”, and urged them to accelerate their efforts to find common ground on key issues well ahead of COP29.

The next opportunities to move forward on the new finance goal – expected as the main outcome from the Baku summit – will be a “retreat” of heads of delegations in July followed by a technical meeting in October, including a high-level ministerial dialogue on the issue.

But several observers told Climate Home that highly contentious issues – such as the size of the funding pot and the list of donors – are beyond the remit of negotiators and are unlikely to be resolved until the political heavyweights, including ministers, take them up in Azerbaijan in November.

Rising costs of climate crisis

“Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight,” Stiell said. “We can’t keep pushing this year’s issues off into the next year. The costs of the climate crisis – for every nation’s people and economy – are only getting worse.”

Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based energy and climate think-tank Power Shift Africa, warned that “multiple factors are setting us up for a terrible shock at COP29″, saying this “ticking disaster threatens to undermine” the NDCs and in turn the 1.5C warming limit.

North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance

In comments posted on X, formerly Twitter, Adow called for justice for those dying from the impacts of climate change such as extreme heat in India and Sudan in recent days, arguing that climate finance remains “a vital part in securing a safe and secure future for us all”.

But, he said, Bonn did not deliver a beacon of hope for vulnerable people. “Developing countries are expected to slay the climate dragon with invisible swords, having gotten zero assurances on the long-term finance they need,” he added.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling and Matteo Civillini, editing by Joe Lo)

The post UN climate chief warns of “steep mountain to climb” for COP29 after Bonn blame-game appeared first on Climate Home News.

Isaac Nemuta next to a meat transport van in the slaughterhouse (Pic: Leo Barasi)

By Leo Barasi in Nairobi

The Maasai people of East Africa have traditionally been livestock herders, but this way of life has come under growing threat.

While the rains in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, where most Maasai live, have always been erratic, droughts have become more frequent in recent decades.

Climate change is expected to add more pressure to herders, as cattle are vulnerable to heat stress: a problem that is likely to become more acute as temperatures increase.

In the face of these challenges, a Maasai community is trying to improve its chances of survival with an innovative project that uses their cows to restore pastureland and generate extra income.

But questions have been raised about whether this project, and others like it, will be enough to allow the Maasai to maintain their traditional way of life.

“You can adapt to climate change over 10 to 20 years, but in the long term, certain livelihoods in certain places won’t be possible anymore”, climate adaptation expert Saleemul Huq told RTCC.

Report: African countries drive progress on HFC phase-out

Studies find that rainfall in East Africa has declined over the last six decades, and local people are concerned that the problem is getting worse.

This year the long rains started several weeks later than usual, in mid-April, while both the short rains of 2013 and long rains of 2014 failed, leaving the region without rain for a year.

At the same time, average and extreme temperatures in the region are projected to increase due to climate change.

The changes to rainfall patterns are already making it increasingly difficult for the Maasai, and other pastoralists, to continue their traditional herding lifestyle.

Innovation

To help pastoralists cope with these changes, a slaughterhouse in Kiserian, just outside Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has pioneered innovative ways of using its waste.

The Keekonyokie Slaughterhouse provides a fifth of the capital’s meat, slaughtering around 150 cows on a busy day.

It has operated for over 30 years, but recently its owners became increasingly worried about the pressures facing local pastoralists.

“The Maasais are face-to-face with climate change”, said Michael Kibue, innovation manager at the slaughterhouse.

To help their 1,000 direct customers survive the changes to rainfall, the slaughterhouse introduced two innovations to change how it processed its waste.

Michael Kibue holding nitrogren-rich fertiliser beside the treatment pits at the slaughterhouse (Pic: Leo Barasi)

The first innovation helps pastoralists restore the grasses that feed their animals.

Until recently the slaughterhouse flushed its waste into a river, which ran on to a nearby town. “The smell was so bad it was even driving the dogs away”, said Kibue.

He realised that the waste could be put to better use and designed a system of channels and pits, which now processes the waste into a nitrogen-rich fertiliser.

The slaughterhouse encourages Maasai pastoralists to bring grass seeds along with their animals for slaughter.

The seeds, when coated with the fertiliser, grow faster, creating more food for the pastoralists’ animals. The better-fed livestock are better able to survive droughts and can be sold at a higher price.

Biogas

Kibue’s second innovation also uses the slaughterhouse’s waste to help Maasai cope with the changing climate.

As well as fertiliser, the waste produces biogas which the slaughterhouse now bottles and plans to sell to the community.

Preparing the gas for sale has been difficult, as methane is harder to compress safely than LPG, but Kibue says it is nearly ready for domestic use: “The cow is now not only a source of meat, it is also a source of energy.”

Since the biogas is generated from waste, the slaughterhouse will be able to sell it at half the price of conventional LPG, so cutting day-to-day costs for pastoralists, as well as reducing their need to spend time collecting firewood.

The fertiliser and biogas projects – together with the slaughterhouse’s emphasis on using all parts of the animal – increase the value of each animal. Selling cows, goats and sheep at a higher price can help pastoralists to build up the resources to get through droughts.

When the biogas is ready for commercial sale, Kibue hopes to produce 100 cylinders a day, which he estimates would be enough for up to 3,000 families.

He acknowledges that the Keekonyokie Slaughterhouse can only make a small difference in helping Maasai pastoralists across the region to carry on raising livestock.

He is optimistic, however, that the innovations he has developed can be taken up by other slaughterhouses: “These are practical solutions and I have been called by five counties who have visited this place.”

With replication in mind, he designed the biogas compressor using technology that he hopes will be affordable for other small-scale slaughterhouses.

Long term

But with the rains increasingly erratic, and temperatures projected to increase, will the help from projects like this be enough for the Maasai to be able to carry on raising cattle?

“You have to distinguish between adapting in the near term and adapting in the long term”, says Huq.

He suggests that projects like these can support the current generation of pastoralists, but in the longer term, more radical changes will be needed: “Their children won’t be doing what their parents are doing.”

Isaac Nemuta, a worker at the slaughterhouse, is more optimistic. While the changing rains are making survival harder for pastoralists, “they will be able to carry on for the next thirty to fifty years,” he says.

And climate projections suggest the long-term outlook might indeed be more positive for Maasai pastoralists.

By the end of the century, rainfall in East Africa is projected to increase, with “more intense wet seasons and less severe droughts”.

Oxfam International have suggested that these conditions could benefit pastoralists, although warns they will bring new challenges including flooding and more competition for land as increased rain improves conditions for agriculture.

With these long-term projections, the value of the Keekonyokie Slaughterhouse may be the potential it represents to help pastoralists survive for long enough to benefit from more favourable climate conditions.

The post Slaughterhouse helps Maasai herders prepare for climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

Parts of Australia’s Gold Coast are vulnerable to flooding (Pic: Flickr/Gary Bembridge)

By Megan Darby

Sea levels are rising and so are urban populations. Increasingly volatile rainfall patterns mean flooding and drought.

Coastal cities face particular threats from climate change. So what are local authorities doing to protect people, property and ecosystems?

RTCC found three very different approaches in Australia, Indonesia and the Netherlands.

First, do no harm

More than half a million people live sprawled along 52km of shoreline in Gold Coast, Australia.

Just south of Brisbane, the city is built on no fewer than seven flood plains. A spell of exceptionally heavy rainfall could do a lot of damage.

The local government is aware of the risks and has placed restrictions on building in areas that would be flooded by the kind of storm that comes round once a century.

But with economic growth and cheaper housing political priorities, there is pressure to find space for new homes.

Hinze Dam, Gold Coast, Australia (Pic: Flickr/Simon Morris)

In the Nerang catchment, residents are protected from flooding by the Hinze Dam, which regulates the flow of water.

The height of the dam was raised in 2012, creating an extra buffer against extreme weather. Other things being equal, this should make it safe to build on lower ground than before.

The council had a decision to make: lower the flood planning level and allow 5,000 more homes to be built, or maintain existing restrictions.

Officials warned the councillors that other things were not equal. Climate change will make rainfall extremes increasingly likely and the benefits of raising Hinze Dam will have eroded by 2060.

In the long run, they argued, building these homes will be bad for the economy. This view prevailed and flood plain regulations stuck.

Proboscis monkeys are endangered by human activities in Borneo (Pic: Flickr/shankar s.)

Save the proboscis monkey

The Indonesian city of Tarakan was once surrounded by dense mangrove forests, home to the proboscis monkey or bekantan.

An island just off the coast of Borneo, Tarakan’s population has swelled to nearly 200,000. Tropical trees have given way to shops, offices and apartments.

Meanwhile, the bekantan population across Borneo has halved in the past four decades, propelling the species onto the IUCN’s Red List of endangered animals.

Tarakan mayor Jusuf Serang Kasim decided to save at least some of the historic forest, declaring 21 hectares a conservation zone.

As well as supporting diverse ecosystems, mangroves provide a buffer against tropical storms and prevent coastal erosion. The zone has become a popular tourist attraction.

Benthemplein square can hold 1.7 million litres of water (Pic: Roel Dijkstra Fotografie-Vlaardingen / Foto Joep van der Pal)

Create “sponge zones”

Some 80% of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, sits below sea level. The port city’s survival depends on an elaborate infrastructure of dykes and dams.

Keeping water at bay is nothing new to the city authorities, but climate change is ramping up the risks.

More erratic rainfall patterns mean flooded basements at one extreme and subsidence of levees – as drought dries out the ground – at the other. Water quality is declining.

With an urban population of one million in a tight space, Rotterdam is all hard surfaces. Rain runs swiftly off roofs and roads, meaning intense bursts of rainfalls can overload the city’s drainage network.

The answer is a network of “sponge zones”, or parts of the city that can retain and release water as needed.

Most ambitious of these is Benthemplein water square. A basketball court and skate park in dry weather, the sunken civic space is designed to fill up with water from surrounding rooftops when it rains. It can hold up to 1.7 million litres of water, which then drains gradually after the downpour finishes.

The post How three coastal cities are rising to the climate challenge appeared first on Climate Home News.

A boat anchored on the banks of Ghoramara Islands in India (Pic: Priyanka Singh)

By Sanjay Pandey in Ghoramara

The island of Ghoramara has shrunk by two thirds in the last four decades, eaten away by sea level rise and a river periodically swollen by erratic rainfall.

It is part of the Sundarbans region of India and Bangladesh, where some 13 million people eke out a living on the front line of climate change.

The World Bank warned in a recent report that sea level rise and population growth are putting the delta’s delicate ecosystems under increasing pressure.

For the islanders, there is a stark choice between gambling on favourable weather or migrating in search of a more stable existence.

Whenever the river rages into their homes, they retreat and rebuild deeper into the heart of the islands praying to God: “May this be the last ingression of the deity-turned-devil.”

In the past 10 years, Hasna Biwi has watched helplessly as the river swallowed her home, farm and cattle three times. “What can we do? Is it humanly possible to chase the raging river away? We have to live with it and die one day,” the 57-year-old told RTCC.

Report: India resists international scrutiny as it shapes climate plan

During monsoon season, inhabitants of islands like Ghoramara live in continual fear of a dam breach that would not only flood their homes and cattle, but also spoil standing crops. Saline water comes in, making the farms infertile.

Pointing to a standing cash crop of betel leaves, farmer Sheikh Rehman said: “If there is a breach this year too, the village will get flooded again, houses will be washed away or damaged and crops spoiled. We have taken a loan of around Rs 80,000 (US$1,300), again hoping against hope that there won’t any breaches this year.”

The family has considered moving to more solid land, but that takes resources it does not have.

“See, we are very poor people. We cannot afford to buy a plot in the mainland. Those who can they have already left. Only death can take us out of this place,” said Rehman’s mother, with tears in her eyes. When she came to Ghoramara in the early 1970s, she recalled, it had a police station and a post office. Now they are gone.

Hasna Biwi with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren at their abandoned house in Ghoramara (Pic: Priyanka Singh)

The story is the same for thousands of people living on the 100-odd islands of the archipelago. Located in the low-lying delta of mighty rivers, the islands have always grown and shrunk on a natural cycle as the water picks up and deposits masses of sediment.

But in recent decades, land losses have outweighted the gains. The Centre for Environmental Studies reports the Sundarbans has shrunk by around 250 square kilometres since the 1930s.

Some islands have vanished from the map altogether, like Lohachara, Suparibhanga and New Moon islands. With sea levels rising 5mm a year, more areas are expected to sink.

Spread over an area of 9,630 square kilometres in India and 16,370 sq km in Bangladesh, Sundarbans has the world’s largest mangrove forest. It hosts a Tiger Reserve and three wildlife sanctuaries.

It is also densely populated, with 1,000 people per square kilometre and a high birth rate.

Report: Climate adaptation costs could hit $1trn a year by 2050 – UN

At a time when the mangrove delta is being battered by cyclones and inundated due to sea-level rise, a team of nearly 50 scientists, led by coastal engineering expert Robert Nicholls from Southampton University, visited the Tiger camp in Indian Sundarbans early this month.

The objective was to find ways to secure water supplies, health and food for the millions living in the delta.

The scientist are trying to understand how to deal with a dynamic situation caused by climate change and human factors alike .

Once the five-year project is over, scientists say, they will be able to predict the different futures facing the delta under various scenarios.

It will be “crucial” not only to understanding the Sundarbans but also similar deltas in Egypt and Ghana that are home to some 500 million people in total, said Tuhin Ghosh, School of Oceanographic Studies joint director.

Migration as adaptation

“Adaptation can be practised locally like changing the agriculture from high-yielding paddy to conventional and sustainable paddy farming using indigenous seeds. You can go for fishing, aqua-culture farm, crab fattening and so on,” said professor Sugata Hazra, director of the School of Oceanography Studies in Jadavpur University.

Another option is to migrate to a safer place, he added. “Migration should be seen in the framework of adaption rather than seeing it as the failure.”

That was the route taken by Suren Mandal, a climate refugee from Ghoramara who now lives in a slum area of Delhi. With the city state’s newly-elected Aam Aadmi Party promising to give every slum-dweller a pukka house, people like Mandal hope to become legal residents of Delhi.

Mandal, who inherited large tracts of land from his father only to see it being swallowed by the hungry tide, said: “I am now assured that nothing can take away the roof over my head.”

Ironically, the people who are suffering the most due to rising sea levels and increasing salinity, have little or no idea what climate change is.

Environmental activist Subhas Datta, who wants to launch a Green party in India, expressed surprise that no political party had made climate change an election issue in the region.

“For the common people, they don’t know about themselves – forget about climate change,” he said. “Ignorance is bliss for these hapless people.”

The post Sundarbans islanders face stark choice as sea levels rise appeared first on Climate Home News.

Players Henri Leconte, Mark Woodforde, Mark Philippoussis and Todd Woodbridge under the hot sun of 2014’s Australian Open (Pic: Flickr/Tourism Victoria)

By Megan Darby

Climate change is threatening the future of Australian sport, experts have warned amid the country’s top tennis tournament.

After players fainted in temperatures of more than 40C last year, the Australian Open updated its policies, adding a roof to one of the courts to protect players from the scorching heat.

A Climate Institute report urged both elite and community clubs to do more to protect the health of players and fans.

John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute, said: “Climate change and extreme weather events threatens the viability of much of our sport as it’s currently played, either in the back yard, at local grounds, or in professional tournaments.

“Football, cricket, tennis, skiing and more are struggling to adapt to, or prepare for, the impacts of climate change.”

Hotting up

Worldwide, US scientists declared 2014 the hottest year on record, confirming a warming trend.

The Australian government’s latest report on climate science predicted steeper temperature rises in Australia than the rest of the world.

On current emissions trends, it projected temperatures in Australia of between 2.8C and 5.1C higher than pre-industrial levels by 2090. The world average in the same scenario is 2.6C to 4.8C.

Andrew Demetriou, former CEO of the Australian Football League, called for urgent emissions cuts to avoid unmanageable climate impacts.

“We can’t afford to stay on the sidelines on this issue,” he said in the report’s foreword.

Heatstroke

Professional sports bodies have heat policies to halt play if temperatures get unbearably high, but the thresholds range from 34C to 41C, the report found.

At last year’s Australian Open, play was suspended on uncovered courts only after several players suffered from heatstroke.

Spectators stayed away, too, with attendance dropping by 12-15,000 on the hottest days – making a significant dent in revenues.

At community level, the researchers found many football clubs had struggled with extreme drought in 2007, with games cancelled, low ticket sales and high costs to restore dried-up, cracked grounds.

“Climate change is putting our weather on steroids,” said Connor. “With greater warming, more extreme heat, changes in rainfall and more intense storms, there are questions about just how far we can push players in elite and local sport.”

In depth: China and Kazakhstan compete for carbon neutral Olympics

For winter sports like skiing, the threat is existential.

Nine out of 16 cities to host a Winter Olympics in the 20th century would not be able to guarantee snowy conditions now, the report found.

In Australia, snowfall has decreased by a third in the past decade.

“To protect what we can of the health of our sports, major changes will be needed in facilities, playing policies and climate action,” said Connor.

The post Sport issued with climate warning at Australian Open appeared first on Climate Home News.

Rice harvests in Nepal are at risk from increasingly volatile rainfall with climate change (Pic: UN Photo/John Isaac)

By Bhrikuti Rai in Kathmandu

Research scientists are coming to the aid of 300 million people along the River Ganges who face a hungry future because their staple rice crop is threatened by climate change.

The team of scientists and development practitioners from Australia, Bangladesh, India and Nepal plan to improve the productivity, profitability and sustainability of 7,000 small-scale farmers in the eastern Gangetic plains with a five-year US$ 6.7 million programme.

According to Nepal’s Ministry for Agriculture Development, 66 per cent of Nepal’s total population of almost 27 million is involved in agriculture and contributes 39 per cent in the GDP.

Local scientists say that lack of access to climate-resilient technologies and dependency on monsoon rains for irrigation are major problems for farmers in Nepal.

Food security

“Nepal is one of the most vulnerable countries to projected climate change effect, so the project will help small-scale farmers address pressing issues about their livelihood and food security,” Devendra Gauchan, senior scientist at Nepal Agricultural Research Council, told the Climate News Network.

Altogether, the eastern Gangetic plains of Nepal, Bangladesh and India are home to 300 million people. The aid team, funded by the Australian government, aim to help rice farmers systems through efficient use of water and conserving resources to improve adaptation to climate change, and also connect them to new markets.

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) will manage the programme, which will be led by the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Centre in eight districts − two in north-west Bangladesh, two in east Nepal, and two each in the Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal.

“Rice-based system productivity [in the eastern Gangetic plains] remains low, and diversification is limited because of poorly-developed markets, sparse agricultural knowledge and service networks, and inadequate development of available water resources,” says Kuhu Chatterjee, South Asia regional manager of ACIAR.

The project was designed in consultation and participation with NARC, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and agricultural universities in India.

New technologies

Local scientists feel that this project will also help build capacity of researchers in Nepal. Gauchan said: “Agricultural research in Nepal has very limited strength in terms of human resource, infrastructure facility and institutional capacity.

“Through this project we will get to learn about new technologies and research management from scientists from participating countries.”

According to Chatterjee, the project will test and fine-tune the technologies developed in countries such as Australia, Canada and Brazil, and will modify them to suit farmers in the eastern Gangetic plains.

“Community consultations will be conducted to identify different ways to optimise the productive use of rain and irrigation water, increase cropping intensity through timely planting, reduced tillage and enhancing access to, and use of, energy-efficient irrigation technologies,” Chatterjee said.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Over the last few years, violent storms, leading to flooding and mudslides, have become more frequent in Brazil.

In 2011, violent rainstorms wreaked havoc in and around Rio. Houses built on steep hillsides were swept away by devastating mudslides. An entire shantytown built on top of a former rubbish dump in Niteroi collapsed, killing over 50 inhabitants.

In Novo Friburgo, a mountainous town settled by 265 Swiss families in 1820, and the surrounding region, over 1000 people died in January 2011, after several days of violent rains.

Sirens had sounded to warn people to evacuate, but many people either did not hear them, or ignored them. The permanent solution of course, would be to provide better housing in safer areas, but that is still many years away.

Now a scheme successfully tried on the other side of the Atlantic is to be launched in the region. The scheme was piloted on Lake Victoria, a giant lake the size of Ireland, which is shared by three countries, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Warnings of high rainfall are transmitted by SMS about four hours before they are due to Brazilian farmers (Pic: Flickr/mauriguanandi)

Its size makes it large enough to create its own weather, and conditions can change suddenly, with winds quickly whipping up six-foot waves capable of capsizing ferries and fishing boats.

Up to five thousand of the Lake’s estimated 200,000 fishermen were dying every year due to these freak storms.

The African scheme is a joint initiative between the UK’s Met Office, the Ugandan Department of Meteorology, and the telecommunications company Ericsson. Text messages are sent to the mobile phones of local fishermen, warning them of changes in the weather.

Before, there were no forecasting services relevant to fishermen in the region, making access to weather information almost impossible.

To capture more accurate information about the local weather conditions, the Met Office set up a 4 km resolution weather forecast model over Lake Victoria.

Tom Butcher, External Relations Manager at the Met Office explained: “A lot of the weather patterns on the lake happen on quite a small scale and are driven by the difference in temperature between the lake’s water and the surrounding land. You get warm moist air at night, rising above the lake and sucking in colder air from over the land surface – a convective process that creates a lot of storms.”

Red means danger

To get round the problem of illiteracy among the fishermen, the forecasters at Uganda’s Department of Meteorology adopted the Met Office’s traffic light system of colour-coded weather warnings.

Green means winds of less than five knots and no significant weather conditions predicted, therefore a very low hazard threshold, no advice needed.

Red means a high likelihood of 20 knots+ winds, or severe thunderstorms, therefore a high hazard threshold and advice to ‘take action’. The project was enthusiastically received by the fishermen and within a few weeks it was saving lives.

In Rio, the scheme involves attaching rain gauges (pluviometers) to mobile phone masts to give warnings in real time of extreme weather and high rainfalls to mobile phone users with 3G, via their providers.

The scheme will eventually be extended to 19 Brazilian states, with the attachment of rain gauges to 1500 masts. Experience has shown that sirens are often ignored, or not heard, but a direct message aimed at a phone user personally is much more effective.

Four hours warning

This is the first scheme to use a direct link between rain gauges and the mobile phone users.

A small-scale scheme, based on information collected via satellite and from a network of meteorological radars maintained by the administration, is already in use, under a partnership between the Rio city authorities, the Civil Defence department and four major mobile phone operators.

The warnings of high rainfall are transmitted by SMS about four hours before they are due. The Civil Defence also has a special warning programme for 3,500 health agents who work in 117 risk areas.

The agents, each responsible for about 100 families, are then expected to spread the warnings by word of mouth. When the rainfall tops 40mm in an hour, or 125 mm in 24 hours, then the agents receive messages telling them to evacuate people.

Mobile phone weather warnings are not only being used for rainfall. It may surprise some readers, who think of Brazil only as a tropical country, to know that in the southern state of Paraná, frost alerts for the region’s coffee farmers are also being sent by SMS to mobile phones.

The initiative, which began in 2012, is the result of a partnership between IAPAR, Parana’s Agricultural Institute and the state’s meteorological system, SIMEPAR.

Paulo Henrique Caramori, coordinator of Iapar’s Agrometeorology department, said: “the SMS service is direct and very quick and enables the coffee growers to speed up protection measures for their trees”.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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