15 August, Climate News Network, Extreme weather puts Africa’s food security at risk. A British government scientific panel says increasingly frequent heat waves, droughts and other extreme weather threaten more – and more severe – global food crises. Developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa which depend heavily on food imports will be worst hit by the increasingly extreme global weather, a report says, with the Middle East and North Africa also threatened, in this case by social unrest. In contrast, the authors say the impact on the world’s biggest economies is likely to be “muted”. But they think a serious crisis could occur as soon as 2016, with repercussions in many countries. They write: “We present evidence that the global food system is vulnerable to production shocks caused by extreme weather, and that this risk is growing…preliminary analysis of limited existing data suggests that the risk of a 1-in-100 year production shock is likely to increase to 1-in-30 or more by 2040.” The report was jointly commissioned by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its Government Science and Innovation Network, with a foreword by the country’s former chief government scientist, Sir David King. He writes: “We know that the climate is changing and weather records are being broken all the time…The food system we increasingly rely on is a global enterprise. Up to now it’s been pretty robust and extreme weather has had limited impact on a global scale. But…the risks are serious and should be a cause for concern. Read More here
Category Archives: Food & Water Issues
13 July 2015, Climate News Network, Record torrential rainfall linked to warming climate: Scientists show that devastating increases in extreme rainfall over the last 30 years fit in with global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases. If you think you’re getting an unusually hard soaking more often when you go out in the rain, you’re probably right. A team of scientists in Germany says record-breaking heavy rainfall has been increasing strikingly in the last 30 years as global temperatures increase. Before 1980, they say, the explanation was fluctuations in natural variability. But since then they have detected a clear upward trend in downpours that is consistent with a warming world. The scientists, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), report in the journal Climatic Change that this increase is to be expected with rising global temperatures, caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Read More here
29 June 2015, Climate News Network, Stress on water resources threatens lives and livelihoods. Satellite data raises red-flag warning about the draining of underground aquifers to meet the demands of expanding populations. The planet’s great subterranean stores of water are running out – and nobody can be sure how much remains to supply billions of people in the future. Satellite instruments used to measure the flow from 37 underground aquifers between 2003 and 2013 have revealed that at least one-third of them were seriously stressed – with little or almost no natural replenishment. The research was conducted by scientists from California and the US space agency NASA, who report in the journal Water Resources Research that they used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to calculate what is happening to aquifers. Read More here
22 June 2015, The Conversation, Climate: the elephant in the room for developing northern Australia: The recently released white paper on developing northern Australia ignores an elephant in the room: climate change. While the paper sees a bright future for the north (roads, rail, dams and food), without considering climate change we can’t be sure the north will even be liveable. The white paper also fails to take into account other environmental constraints such as water and soils….. The white paper has not referenced high-quality expert advice prepared by the Northern Australian Land and Water Task Force…. The white paper ignores reference to sophisticated climate change projections for northern Australia developed by our own CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology. Climate projections for the north this century paint a dire future and bring into question the feasibility and affordability of many of the development policies, plans and projects outlined in the white paper. Read More here