August 13, 2009
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Monitoring & Testing Newsletter August 13, 2009 |
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| This Week´s Featured News Stories |
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Senior UN official calls for urgent measures to mitigate impact of landslides
Action must be taken to mitigate the impact of landslides such as those triggered recently in parts of East Asia by Typhoon Morakot, which has reportedly buried entire villages and killed scores of people, a senior United Nations official working on disaster risk reduction stressed this week. “As this week’s tragic events in East Asia show once again, people living on unstable slopes and steep terrains are particularly at risk from landslides in the wake of torrential rain and flooding,” said Margareta Wahlström, who heads the UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). “While ... |
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Measuring global soil changes
Global change is increasingly affecting important terrestrial ecosystem functions such as the filtering and buffering capacity of soils, the supply of clean water, soil fertility, and consequently, the production of food, feed, and fiber. Recent studies and reports from the United Nations indicate that water and soil resources are both heavily under pressure. Worldwide about 2 billion ha of land (15% of the total land surface and 40% of agricultural land) is affected by degradation caused by, e.g., deforestation, poor land and watershed management, and dumping of contaminants. In addition, clean ... |
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