|
|
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 07 Sep 2011
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that visiting Pacific nations threatened by rising seas had reinforced his belief that climate change was real and posed a genuine threat to humanity.
 The island of Kiribati is on the front line of climate change. Photograph: Richard Vogel/AP Ban stopped in the Solomon Islands and Kiribati on his way to New Zealand for the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and described the two small nations as “on the front line” of the climate change issue.
He said Kiribati, where some villagers have been forced to relocate as the rising ocean encroaches on their land, dramatically illustrated climate change’s impact on the planet.
“For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to visit Kiribati or the Solomon Islands and most of the Pacific island countries,” he said in a speech at Auckland University.
“Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet — quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere.”
Ban said that in his role as UN leader he had seen the impact of climate change first-hand in areas of the globe ranging from Antarctica to the Amazon Basin and Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa.
He said scientific evidence backed up his view. Continue reading Climate change is lapping at our feet
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 21 July 2011
Climate change could exponentially increase the scale of natural disasters while at the same time threatening world security, a senior UN official told the UN Security Council Wednesday.
Floods, such as the ones [...]
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 09 June 2011
Climate change will have major impacts on the availability of water for growing food and on crop productivity in the decades to come, warns a new FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] report.
 Loss of glaciers will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture ‘Climate Change, Water, and Food Security’ is a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture.
These include reductions in river runoff and aquifer recharges in the Mediterranean and the semi-arid areas of the Americas, Australia and southern Africa — regions that are already water-stressed. In Asia, large areas of irrigated land that rely on snowmelt and mountain glaciers for water will also be affected, while heavily populated river deltas are at risk from a combination of reduced water flows, increased salinity, and rising sea levels.
Additional impacts described in the report:
An acceleration of the world’s hydrological cycle is anticipated as rising temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from land and sea. Rainfall will increase in the tropics and higher latitudes, but decrease in already dry semi-arid to mid-arid latitudes and in the interior of large continents. A greater frequency in droughts and floods will need to be planned for but already, water scarce areas of the world are expected to become drier and hotter.
Even though estimates of groundwater recharge under climate change cannot be made with any certainty, the increasing frequency of drought can be expected to encourage further development of available groundwater to buffer the production risk for farmers. Continue reading Water warning for agriculture
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 03 May 2011
World sea levels could rise by between 0.9 and 1.6 metres (2ft 11in to 5ft 3in) this century, stoked by accelerated climate change in the Arctic, a study showed on Tuesday.
 Antarctica contains enough ice to raise sea levels by about 57 metres if it ever all melted. The projection, by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, is higher than most past estimates including a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main U.N. scientific group.
Rising sea levels are a threat to cities from New York to Buenos Aires, coasts from the Netherlands to China and low-lying islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.
Following is a history of sea level rise and projections:
History – Sea levels rose about 120 metres (almost 400 ft) after a thaw at the end of the last Ice Age about 21,000 years ago released vast amounts of water frozen on land.
Sea levels stabilised about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, with “no significant change from then until the late 19th century”, the IPCC said in 2007. During the 20th century, they rose about 17 cms. Since 1993, rates have accelerated to about 3 mm per year. Continue reading Higher sea level rise projected
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 08 April 2011
Many fastest-growing cities, especially those in the developing world, stand to suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change, a new study reported on Thursday.
 In cities, prolonged hot weather can exacerbate existing levels of air pollution, causing health problems. Few urban areas are taking the necessary steps to protect their residents – billions of people around the globe – from such likely events as heat waves and rising seas, according to research to appear in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and European Planning Studies.
They are also failing to cut their own emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the study found.
“Climate change is a deeply local issue and poses profound threats to the growing cities of the world,” study author Patricia Romero Lankao, a sociologist specialising in climate change and urban development, said in a statement.
Because half of Earth’s population is in cities, scientists like Romero Lankao are focusing on the potential climate change impacts in these areas.
Air pollution
The mere fact that they are cities, with densely packed construction, places their populations at greater risk from natural disasters, including those expected to be made worse by climate change. Continue reading Fast growing cities will suffer more from climate change
|
Water Rhapsody
is a
WWF Green Trust
award winner.
Save up to 90% of your municipal water bill.
|
