SciDev.Net articles

Ilan Kelman examines the history, overlaps and conflicts between climate change, development and disasters.

By the end of 2015, three global policy processes will have set the stage for how the world responds to major challenges facing humanity in the years to come. A voluntary agreement to tackle disasters was reached in Sendai, Japan, in March; the voluntary

Who’s linking climate change, development, and disaster reduction? Ilan Kelman rounds up vital sources and voices.

Many useful and mainly free online resources reflect the links amongst climate change, development and disaster risk reduction — the following are some key organisations and documents.

Focus on climate change

Climate change science has been much debated. The full history of the science is lai

Governments must integrate work across frameworks if global policy won’t, say Zenaida Delica-Willison and JC Gaillard.

Disasters are a serious challenge everywhere. All communities need resilient and sustainable development, and that cannot be achieved without thinking through Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategies. But many years of discussion and work on DRR have been side-lined by policy makers since

The cardboard box is covered with a layer of dust so thick it must have been tucked away in this Kenyan basement for decades. The researcher wipes off the dust and rummages through the papers stored inside by someone long since retired. Sheet after sheet of neatly typed paper emerges, the faded rows of numbers detailing rainfall, temperature and wind speed. In a way, the researcher is hunting for treasure. And she is not alone.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, dozens of her colleagues are searc

The world is witnessing a coal renaissance. While public attention remains focused on the progress of the clean energy sector, a ‘black revolution’ of coal power stations is taking shape in the developing world, in particular in Asia, according to Ottmar Edenhofer, the chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Clima

As the UN’s COP 21 meeting in Paris, France, draws closer, the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is under consideration. In numerous consultations from Nairobi to Berlin, member countries and scientists are discussing what’s next for the body whose scientific assessments have underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change since the late 1980s.

W

Patrick Wagnon is a glaciologist at the Institute of Research for Development in France, and a visiting scientist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal. As a global ‘glacier chaser’, he has summited some of the highest mountains in the world, including the 8,516 metre Lhotse in the Himalayas.

In 2001, Wagnon and his fellow glaciologist Christian Vincent, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, launched GLACIOCLIM

Across the globe, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. One billion have to defecate in the open, 748 million lack access to improved drinking water and 1.8 billion use a source of drinking water contaminated with faeces. These are some of the statistics that highlight the enormity of the challenge facing the world if the draft Sustainable Development Goal of safe drinking water,

Let’s measure only what really counts to make progress on climate change adaptation, says Susanne Moser.

“What gets measured, gets done!” — those were the words spoken ten years ago by a municipal planner from a large Californian city at a workshop I was cohosting on early responses to climate change. She explained all the details of how the city mobilised its staf

Outdoor air pollution kills more than three million people each year. “We can now estimate the cost of air pollution for the advanced and emerging economies of the world, including China and India,” says Rana Roy, consulting economist for the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the WHO, speaking at