International Conservation & Development

Doreen Stabinsky, Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala University, Sweden and Professor of Global Environmental Politics, at College of the Atlantic, Maine, USA, said the price tag for climate damages this century will be in the trillions, with much of that damage in poor and vulnerable countries. “The US is responsible for much of that toll, but they don’t care and they won’t pay. With arm twisting of developing countries, they have language now protecting the richest and heaping devastating costs onto the poorest,” she said.

The air in San Sebastián Tepalcatepec, a farming community in the south-central Mexican state of Puebla, is hot and dry and, frankly, reeks. Alexander Eaton rolls down the window of his pickup truck and inhales. “This smells like opportunity,” he tells Quartz with a grin.

Forty percent of the world’s people share the tropics with 50 percent of the world’s terrestrial life. World population has more than doubled since 1960. Land use decisions will become increasingly controversial as it soars from 7.2 billion to a projected 9.6 billion in 2050. A downloadable publication from the Smithsonian and the BIO Program of the Inter-American Development Bank, “Managing watersheds for ecosystem services in the steepland Neotropics,” offers new tools to weigh trade-offs between water, timber, biodiversity and development.

Of all the issues that will need to be resolved in Paris, experts warn that loss-and-damage may have the greatest potential to derail negotiations before an agreement can be reached. “This is about whether or not they have a place to live and sustain their families into the future,” said Heather Coleman, Oxfam America’s climate policy director. “So this is not a small issue, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.” Read more

Heather Coleman spoke at the the NASA Climate Policy Speaker Series on Oxfam's global work and COP21. Visit the NASA website

In a significant move to save one of the world’s most-treasured marine animals, Peru has approved strong regulations to protect the giant oceanic manta ray, a species particularly vulnerable to fishing activity.

... [A]s reported by Haaretz correspondent Zafrir Rinat this week, Agricultural Minister Uri Ariel, has decided to cut almost all funding to the botanical gardens, reducing it to a paltry 100,000 shekels (less than 10,000 shekels per garden). The garden managers have already reported that they will have to cut back and cancel many of their gardens’ educational and research programs. Apparently, Minister Ariel has decided that these gardens are not worthy of public support.

"The Chinese government likes to hold authority over data for fear that different numbers than those from official sources could lead to social unrest," says Angel Hsu, a professor with the Yale School of Forestry And Environmental Studies, who has researched the poor quality of Chinese data. "China claims they don't have the human capacity to maintain and run the monitors," she says. "But they were monitoring air quality for over a decade; they just didn't release it because they were worried that it would lead to social unrest."

Without policies to protect the world’s most vulnerable from crop failure, natural disasters, waterborne diseases and other impacts of climate change, 100 million more people could sink into poverty by 2030, the World Bank said. The report unveiled yesterday is one of a growing number of high-level studies linking poverty to climate change. This one, World Bank officials said, goes further by combining findings from household surveys in 90 nations with modeling results on the impact of rising global temperatures on food prices, heat waves, floods, droughts and diseases.