Tag: climate change

With droughts in the Sahel, US and Russia, 2012 has seen rising food prices and hunger worsening. In the midst of the desert in Doha, we’ve seen another drought. A drought of climate action from rich countries who rather than responding to the challenges poised by climate change have once again failed to deliver on […] Read more »

Here in Doha, negotiation sessions are going deep into the night. Negotiators with tired eyes are talking about redlines and deadlines. Throughout the last two weeks, the issue of climate finance has been a major sticking point. So far only a handful of European countries and the UK have announced new climate finance pledges. Developing […] Read more »

From the food crisis in West Africa to drought in the US, from receding Arctic ice to a dying Great Barrier Reef, a changing climate has never felt more real. Over the next two weeks the Australian Government has an important choice to make. We’re rallying our supporters on Twitter to help make sure it […] Read more »

The results are in. The Arctic summer melt record has not merely been broken. It’s been smashed – confounding experts and revealing that ice loss is happening far faster than models predicted. The previous record, set in 2007 was surpassed on 27 August, weeks before the end of the melt season. Since then we have […] Read more »

With greenhouse gas emissions at an all time high, and the world lurching towards a third food price spike in four years following the worst US drought since the 1950s, there is an alarming gap in our knowledge – how will an increase in extreme weather caused by climate change affect future food prices? To date, research on food […] Read more »

Negotiators are in Bangkok for another round of UN climate talks (30 Aug – 5 Sep). This is an “intersessional” – a less formal round and lower profile event than the annual Conference of the Parties (COP). It is the second intersessional since COP17 in Durban (with one having been held in Bonn in May) […] Read more »

Remember how you felt in 2007 when we belatedly ratified the Kyoto Protocol? The broad community support for our signing of Kyoto was accompanied by a strong sense of relief that finally Australia was onboard with international efforts to tackle climate change. In doing so, we provided hope to many of the world’s poorest and […] Read more »

Millions of the world’s poorest people will face devastation from today’s rocketing food prices because the global food system is fatally flawed and policy-makers can’t find the courage to fix it. Policy-makers have taken cheap food for granted for nearly 30 years. Those days are gone. Developing countries are bracing themselves for the worst effects […] Read more »

In the Sahel region of West Africa, an estimated 18.7 million people are currently experiencing severe food shortages, with more than 1 million children at risk of acute malnutrition. This emergency has been building since early 2012. Low rainfall and water shortages, poor harvests and sky-rocketing food prices (expected to keep rising until the end […] Read more »

What happens when climate change impacts on source products that are part of a global supply chain? Oxfam posed this question to three multinational corporations to find out what companies can do to support the farmers in their value chains to adapt. The boss of the world’s largest oil and gas company, ExxonMobil, recently described global […] Read more »