Indigenous people 'excluded from development efforts'

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Laura Owings in SciDev.net: Representatives of some of the world's indigenous people have raised concerns that the global development agenda — including the UN's Millennium Development Goals and their planned successors — is being implemented without their full consent and participation.

The 12th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York, which ended last week (31 May), gathered to address the global response to political, economic and cultural problems affecting the world's most vulnerable communities.

Issues of health, education and sustainable development were top of the two-week agenda for the 2,000 delegates from nearly 100 countries who attended, as were efforts by the global community to uphold agreements outlined in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

But some indigenous representatives highlighted the disconnect between global development policy and how it is implemented in their communities. "We are concerned that, while the Millennium Development Goals have been established for some time now, we see government agencies instituting and implementing projects, and indigenous people [still] not involved in deciding, planning or monitoring these interventions," says Pablo Mis, a member of the Q'eqchi Maya people from southern Belize and coordinator for the Maya Leaders Alliance...

Aztec drums, from the Florentine Codex, 16th century

Women are 'key drivers' in climate change adaptation

Bernard Appiah in SciDev.net: Plans to protect ecosystems and help people adapt to climate change ― also known as ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) ― must involve vulnerable groups, including women and communities greatly hit by global warming if they are to succeed, according to scientists who met in Tanzania last month (21-23 March).

Scientists and policymakers at the UN-led international workshop on EBA in Dar-es-Salaam, also said that more needed to be done to monitor and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of such adaptation, and to learn from past experiences in order to transfer knowledge into action and policy.

"Adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change is vital in order to reduce the impacts of climate change that are happening now, and increase resilience to future impacts," says Richard Kinley, deputy executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organised the meeting. "Ecosystem-based approaches are part of the solution that countries could use in building resilience to climate change," he adds.

For example, mangroves or forest — rather than artificial sea walls — should be maintained or restored to help protect coastlines. The mangroves can improve water quality and thus increase fish yields, while also protecting fishing communities from future disasters....

Innovate to put climate know-how into practice

Laurie Goering in AlertNet: Knowledge is now plentiful on how to adapt to climate change and build resilience to its impacts, but putting that expertise into practice remains a problem around the world, climate and security experts say.

“We’re at a point where we’ve run through the theory and have to start doing practical stuff,” said Nick Mabey, the chief executive of E3G (Third Generation Environmentalism), an international non-profit organisation that works on accelerating transitions to sustainable development.

Applying knowledge in real contexts will require everything from finding ways to work with corrupt or exploitative governments, to using game theory to help bureaucrats get hands-on experience in making effective decisions, Mabey and other experts said at a London roundtable meeting on climate security issues.

Measures like moving responsibility for climate adaptation from environment ministries to more powerful finance or economy ministries will also be helpful, they said, as will financial and other incentives for politicians and officials to take action.

...One problem facing governments and other institutions trying to incorporate climate adaptation into their planning is that decisions often need to be made quickly, across departments, and in ways that go against traditional planning.

After Pakistan’s record-breaking 2010 floods destroyed roads, schools and other infrastructure, for instance, officials came under pressure to rebuild facilities fast. As a result, many were reconstructed to existing standards – not to a level that would make them more resilient in the face of worsening floods, droughts and other climate impacts, Mabey said. “The urgency of now meant they rebuilt as things had been. That’s going to happen again and again in a lot of places,” he warned....

A broken bridge in Pakistan, shot by Maria Ly, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Global Adaptation Institute launches open consultation process for the 2012 GAIN Index

Sacramento Bee via PR Newswire: The Global Adaptation Institute (GAIN) will host an international Open Consultation process before release of the 2012 GAIN Index in October. This consultation reflects GAIN's commitment to updating the index each year to incorporate new or revised data and advice on methodological, design and communications improvements.

The GAIN Index (index.gain.org) is a navigation tool to help guide investments in adaptation and assess a country's vulnerability and readiness to adapt to global challenges such as population growth, urbanization and climate change.

"Since release of the GAIN Index one year ago, we have presented it in six continents and to dozens of business leaders, think tanks, government agencies and academic institutions, said GAIN Founding CEO Dr. Juan Jose Daboub. "The response has been overwhelmingly positive and along the way GAIN has gladly accepted suggestions to enhance the power of the index."

Such improvements under consideration include incorporating indicators for ecosystem services and urbanization. Ecosystem services are the multitude of ecological processes that humans rely upon to support their lives and livelihoods, providing food and clean water, natural disaster protection, climate regulation and nutrient cycling. Understanding urban trends and conditions is key to effective adaptation as many of the challenges humanity faces from population growth and climate change will take place in cities....

Citizen scientists' climate-impact forest survey wraps up

Priya Shetty in Nature News: One of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this month after five years of data collection. The wealth of information gathered will help researchers to understand how climate change is affecting forests.

The effort has been coordinated by Earthwatch, an environmental group and a member of the HSBC Climate Partnership, which supports a range of environmental projects funded by the international bank. Earthwatch aimed to improve the way that temperate and tropical forests are monitored in countries such as Brazil, China and India, in order to better understand the way that forests capture and release carbon, one of the least understood aspects of the global carbon cycle. Earthwatch has recruited more than 2,200 volunteers (all HSBC employees) to measure tree growth, study the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor and analyse soil samples to estimate how much carbon is captured.

"Forests play a huge role in regulating climates at global scale and provide livelihoods for many millions of people, so understanding how they are going to change and adapt to changing conditions is one of the most pressing environmental questions of our time,” says Robert Ewers, a forest biodiversity researcher at Imperial College London who is not involved in the Earthwatch project. "Every forest is different, so well-managed and quality-controlled citizen science such as Earthwatch’s programme represents a powerful way of gaining the large volumes of data that are needed to gain insight into the global patterns of forest change."...

A view of the Amazon rainforest, shot by Beyond The Ultimate Llc Race Director Wes Crutcher, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Report assesses Wisconsin's climate change impacts, adaptation strategies

University of Wisconsin-Madison: A statewide collaborative of scientists and diverse stakeholders is proposing a multitude of measures to help protect and enhance Wisconsin's natural resources, economic vitality, and public well-being as the state's climate becomes warmer and wetter. Their report, "Wisconsin's Changing Climate: Impacts and Adaptation," was released today by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI). It is available online here.

"This report is the first comprehensive survey of climate change impacts in Wisconsin, and it provides information that will help decision-makers begin to plan for the kinds of changes we're likely to see in the years ahead," says Lewis Gilbert, associate director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and member of WICCI's science council.

Public officials, resource managers, business owners, and farmers are among the many groups expected to draw upon the new report's recommendations as they anticipate and address the impacts of current and future climate change across the state.

"We need to think about what climate change could mean for our natural resources and actively plan to address the issue," says Jack Sullivan, director of science services at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Sullivan coordinates efforts within the agency to evaluate how a changing climate may alter its management responsibilities and how to minimize negative impacts.

UW-Madison scientists already have documented changes in Wisconsin's climate that have occurred over the past 60 years, including a 1.3 degree Fahrenheit increase in the annual average temperature — 2.5 degrees in winter — and more frequent occurrences of heavy rainfall.

Using sophisticated computer models, the scientists also have projected that Wisconsin's average temperature is likely to rise an additional 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century and that more total precipitation and more intense storms are highly probable in many parts of the state….

A (female?) juvenile Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius) hovering over potential prey, shot by Dori, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license