The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
A new study from Japan suggests that male foetuses may be particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially the extreme variations in temperature. After looking at monthly temperature data gathered from 1968 to 2012 and comparing it with foetal deaths and infants born during the period, the team found a correlation …
Record temperatures in Australia in 2013 were almost certainly caused by man-made climate change, five separate studies have found. Researchers from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and the University of NSW have concluded it is "virtually impossible" that the heatwaves that hit Australia in 2013 would have …
Hyderabad, Mumbai and Shimla spanning 2005 - 2012. We developed Poisson regression models to study ‘the main temperature effect’ as well as ‘additional impacts’ of sustained high and low temperatures (i.e. heat and cold waves) on all-cause mortality risk. Results: We find large heterogeneity among mortality risks across urban areas. …
Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) help us to understand the extent to which ecological and human systems are likely to be affected by climate change and provide information on sensitivity and exposure to changes in climate as well as the adaptive capacity of systems and populations to withstand these changes. …
Climate change can make heat waves more likely and more severe, according to a study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found fewer clear links to extreme weather such as drought and storms. Twenty independent teams looked at 16 events around the world in 2013, including in …
Mangroves are being destroyed at a rate 3 - 5 times greater than the average rates of forest loss, costing billions in economic damages and denying millions of people the ecosystem services they need to survive, according to a new report by UNEP. The Importance of Mangroves: A Call to …
A report investigates the causes of a wide variety of extreme weather and climate events from around the world in 2013. Published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective" addresses the causes of 16 individual extreme events that occurred on …
Efforts to forge a new global agreement on global warming will not repeat the mistakes that dogged the landmark climate summit in Copenhagen five years ago, Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy on climate change has vowed. “This is a different environment to Copenhagen,” Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, told …
Climate change will unleash megadroughts in the coming decades worse than anything seen in the last 2,000 years, new research warns. In semi-arid regions such as the U.S. southwest, there is an 80 percent chance of a drought lasting more than a decade, according to a study published in the …
The UK can expect to see increasingly extreme weather as climate change pushes temperatures up in the Arctic at twice the global average, according to new research. The rising Arctic temperature is causing the jet stream – a key determinant of the weather – to take a more amplified and …
The evidence for anthropogenic climate change continues to strengthen, and concerns about severe weather events are increasing. As a result, scientific interest is rapidly shifting from detection and attribution of global climate change to prediction of its impacts at the regional scale. However, nearly everything we have any confidence in …
The cost of weather-related disasters in the five years since global leaders last met to discuss climate change is almost half a trillion dollars ($490 billion) – three times more than for the whole of the 1970s. In The Summit that Snoozed? Oxfam says that more than 650 million people …
This report analyses impacts of four extreme weather events (a heat wave in Russia, flooding in Pakistan, drought in East Africa, and a typhoon in the Philippines) on food security. For each case, the nature of the extreme weather is characterized, and its impact on vulnerable people is assessed by …
World is running out of space and time and it is high time to raise ambition and take actual action to reduce carbon emission said Sunita Narain, the director general of the Centre for Science and Environment. The United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) and The Forum of Environmental Journalists in …
August 2014 was marginally the warmest August worldwide since records began 130 years ago, according to new data from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Temperatures measured by government meteorological offices using land, sea and satellite data suggest this year’s global high was very close to those of 2011, 2008, …
IDMC’s latest Global Estimates report shows that 22 million people were displaced in 2013 by disasters brought on by natural hazard events. As in previous years, the worst affected region is Asia, where 19 million people, or 87.1 per cent of the global total, were displaced during the year. Although …
Future sea level rises could put more than $200 billion of Australian infrastructure at risk, a report by the Climate Council has found. The report, Counting the Costs: Climate Change and Coastal Flooding, showed sea levels were likely to rise by between 40 centimetres and one metre over the next …
Germany, which faced heavy rains and intermittent periods of hot and cold this summer, should brace for extreme weather in future probably because of climate change. Low-pressure areas over central Europe brought monsoon-like rainfall and storms to parts of Germany, Paul Becker, vice president of state-run Deutscher Wetterdienst said today. …
A new water pumping station in the Unnichchi tank in Sri Lanka’s eastern Batticaloa District was established in 2010 as part of a new water distribution system. Pic courtesy of Trust.org South Asia is set to get a new drought monitoring tool next year, which policymakers hope will help a …
Two categories of evolutionary challenges result from escalating human impacts on the planet. The first arises from cancers, pathogens and pests that evolve too quickly, and the second from the inability of many valued species to adapt quickly enough. Applied evolutionary biology provides a suite of strategies to address these …
