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US On Climate Change
The United Nations chief warned Tuesday that climate chaos and food crises are increasing threats to global peace, telling a high-level U.N. meeting that climate disasters imperil food production and empty bellies fuel unrest. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the UN Security Council to address the impact of food shortages and rising temperatures on international peace and security a view echoed by many countries but not Russia. Climate and conflict are two leading drivers of (our) global food crisis, the secretary-general said. Where wars rage, hunger reigns whether due to displacement of people, destruction of agriculture, damage to infrastructure, or deliberate policies of denial. Meanwhile, climate chaos is imperiling food production the world over, he said. Guterres said the world is teeming with examples of the devastating relationship between hunger and conflict. In war-torn Gaza, he said, no one has enough to eat and the tiny strip accounts for 80% of the 700,000
The UN COP climate meetings are organised in a way that benefits richer and larger countries at the expense of smaller and poorer ones, according to a study. The research by a team from the University of Leeds in the UK and Lund University in Sweden also labels the participating countries as either Radicals, Opportunists, Hypocrites or Evaders. Every year, the UN organises its global climate change Conference of the Parties, "COP," with the aim to create action to halt climate change and support those vulnerable to the effects of climate change. "Our analysis clearly shows that some groups are not heard or represented. The very structure of the COPs makes it almost impossible for smaller countries to voice their interests since they are not able to be present in all the parallel negotiations," says Lina Lefstad, a PhD student at Lund University and lead author of the study. The study, published in the journal Critical Policy Studies, is based on an analysis of fifteen previous ...
Climate change is the biggest long-term crisis that Singapore faces and adapting to it will require infrastructural investments, the country's Indian-origin presidential hopeful Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said. Tharman, 66, resigned from public and political posts in July to run for the presidency and is likely to face a challenge from three other Chinese-origin Singaporeans who have submitted bids to contest the election. The Indian-origin former minister shared his knowledge of managing national reserves and explained how this experience will help him in his role as the president if he is elected. During the global financial crisis in 2008, precipitated by the bursting of the US housing bubble, Tharman said he was a finance minister and had proposed a draw of Singapore dollars 4.9 billion from the past reserves to fund a jobs credit scheme and a plan to encourage banks to lend money to businesses. For the second time, Tharman was a senior minister advising Prime Minister Lee Hsie
Research on a flat spot for air evacuations. Talk of old-style civil defense sirens to warn of fast-moving wildfires. Hundreds of urban firefighters training in wildland firefighting techniques while snow still blankets the ground. This is the new reality in Alaska's largest city, where a recent series of wildfires near Anchorage and the hottest day on record have sparked fears that a warming climate could soon mean serious, untenable blazes in urban areas just like in the rest of the drought-plagued American West. The risk is particularly high in the city's burgeoning Anchorage Hillside neighbourhood, where multi-million dollar homes have pushed further and further up steep slopes and to the forest's edge. Making the challenge even greater is that many of these areas on the Hillside home to about 35,000 people have but one road in and out, meaning that fleeing residents could clog a roadway or be cut off from reaching Anchorage at all. The prospect of a major wildfire there kee