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Can Citizen Science Help Small Communities Combat Big Fishing Fleets?
›This Earth Day weekend, the U.S. Department of State is hosting more than 2,000 coders in more than 40 cities to encourage creative thinking about technological solutions to ocean issues. The third annual Fishackathon could produce new tools for local communities to track long-distance fishing, a growing problem in some places, as China, in particular, scales up its efforts.
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Turning the Impending Mosul Dam Disaster Into Opportunity
›Iraq has seen its share of calamities in recent years, but none is as dangerous as the impending failure of the Mosul Dam. A breach of the dam will result in a tsunami-like wave that sweeps through cities and hamlets along the Tigris River from Mosul to as far south as Amarah and even Basra. Baghdad would be submerged under five meters of water within four days. Not only do experts estimate the possible fatalities to range from 500,000 to more than 1 million, but consider the logistics of trying to provide electricity, drinking water, food, hospitals, transportation, and diesel for millions of people.
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Breaking the Fragility Trap: What Role for the World Bank?
›Last month, the World Bank’s Fragility Forum in Washington, DC, brought together some 600 participants to discuss how to advance sustainable development in the context of increasing conflicts and violence. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim opened the forum by emphasizing that we are at a critical moment.
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Joan Whelan on a New Strategy at the Office of Food for Peace: Address Conflict
›Since its inception more than 60 years ago, USAID’s Office of Food for Peace has provided critical food assistance to billions of people around the world. Yet, despite its name, the office lacked a strategy to address the effects of conflict on its work.
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Tracking China’s “Foul and Filthy” Rivers With Citizen Science
›Blackened rivers snake the ring roads of Beijing, carrying pollution and often smelly water from one end of the city to another. The most polluted of these have been dubbed “foul and filthy” rivers (黑臭河) by China’s Ministry of the Environment (MEP) and Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD). However, the government has decided to clean these up – and is enlisting the help of the public to do so.
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A More Extreme Sea-Level Rise Scenario, and the Global Environmental Burden of Disease
›Though governments have agreed to try to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a paper by James Hansen et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds that goal may not prevent major changes on an irreversible and unadaptable scale. Studying the last interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago, when the temperature was less than one degree Celsius warmer than today, Hansen et al. estimate sea level was six to nine meters higher than today.
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Can Better Data Lead to More Women in Environmental Leadership Positions?
›The saying goes, what hasn’t been counted doesn’t count. Our latest datasets for the Environment and Gender Information (EGI) platform are proving this true.
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What Next? Climate Adaptation After Paris
›In December 2015, representatives from 195 nations gathered in Paris for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. After two weeks of intensive negotiations, countries approved an agreement that charts new territory for global cooperation to address climate change. [Video Below]
Showing posts from category environment.