Climate Change

Changing Weather, Changing Fortunes

Sri Lanka has paused for breath after the extreme weather conditions last year that many associate with climate change.

Doha Faces an Indonesian Test

To most people, holes in the ozone layer or the melting of polar ice caps can sound like distant catastrophes. “But let's talk about concrete examples,” says an Indonesian director whose documentary film captures the lives of local farmers affected by a dramatically changing environment.

Coastal Erosion Reaches Alarming Levels in Vietnam

By Thuy Binh

For the last decade, many families in this southwestern Vietnamese province have been uprooted at least once every two years – but this is not due to economic or political upheaval.

Groups Rewarded in Their Fight for Fair Food

By Becky Bergdahl

The Korean Women's Peasant Association won the 2012 Food Sovereignty Prize for its efforts on behalf of the survival of small-scale and ecologically sustainable farming in South Korea.

Farming in Bangladesh Stays Afloat – Literally

By Naimul Haq

With the rains over Gopalganj district intensifying each year and much of Baikantapur village permanently waterlogged, Bijoy Kumar Sen had little choice but to abandon traditional rice farming and grow vegetables on bairas – floating islands built of straw and aquatic plants.

Caribbean Islands Brace for Challenges of Climate Change

By Desmond Brown

Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas remembers how quiet - even uneventful – this tiny twin-island federation was for the first four decades of his life.

Kenya’s Water Wars Kill Scores

By Protus Onyango

Water scarcity is fuelling deadly inter-ethnic wars that continue to claim lives in Kenya, according to government officials. And if nothing is done to educate communities on how to conserve the valuable resource, the situation will escalate, governance experts and environmentalists warn.

Kyoto Protocol May End With the Year

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

As government negotiators from the world’s poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha – the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

PACIFIC ISLANDS: Marine Protected Areas Bolster Conservation Efforts

By Stephen Leahy

The world's smallest island nations wield more power than their sizes would suggest, with millions of square kilometres in their domains, said leaders of Pacific Island nations gathered at a special forum here in the Cook Islands.

Farming Among the Waste in Cameroon

By Monde Kingsley Nfor

Cameroonian urban famer Juliana Numfor has six plots of land where she grows maize, cassava, sweet potatoes and leafy vegetables, including cabbages, wild okra and greens.

Improving the efficiency of small pumps could contribute to making irrigation viable for smallholder farmers. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Q&A: Smallholder Farmers Driving New Trend Against Climate Change

By Busani Bafana

Small-scale irrigation schemes can provide the biggest opportunity for boosting food security in Africa, according to Meredith Giordano, the research director at the International Water Management Institute.

“The Truth is That All Problems Have Solutions” – Even Climate Change in Ethiopia

By Isaiah Esipisu

Eight years ago Kenbesh Mengesha earned an uncertain income collecting firewood from local government forests and selling them to her fellow slum-dwellers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She would earn on average about 50 cents a day, if she was lucky.

Riding Towards Sustainable Development, on Bamboo

By Portia Crowe

In Ghana, a country burgeoning with traffic congestion, increasing economic growth, and a stark urban-rural divide, making frames of bicycles out of bamboo could be the key to promoting sustainable development. It also makes stronger, longer-lasting bikes.

Going Far, and Fast, on Electrofuels

By Lowana Veal

A speeding ticket for driving an electric vehicle may seem at first a far-fetched possibility, but no. The director of Northern Lights Energy – a company specialising in promoting electric cars – was recently fined for driving 124 km per hour in a 90 km zone in Iceland in a Tesla Roadster vehicle.

Livelihoods Drying Up on Malawi’s Lake Chilwa

By Claire Ngozo

Fisherfolk and farmers living near Malawi’s second-largest water body, Lake Chilwa, are relocating en masse and scrambling for space around its shores as the lake has dried to dangerously low levels.