Heatwaves, wildfires, rising seas. Read more about the greatest threats facing humanity today and how we can address them.

Most of California’s water agencies have said that they have sufficient supply for the next seven months. However, a recent state report shows that almost 20% of the agencies could run out of supply soon.



INHABITAT

Nearly 20% California water supply has extreme shortages

Drought, floods and the melting of glaciers affected almost every part of the world in 2021, according to a new WMO report.



Bloomberg Green

Satellites Show Climate Change Thinning Rivers, Erasing Glaciers

Wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns, the gendarmes appear suddenly in the middle of farm fields misted by morning rain. They stand behind two fences equipped with security cameras and overhead lights, looking every bit like prison guards. But there is no prison for miles.


The New York Times

French Police Guard Water as Seasonal Drought Intensifies

If Qatar is one of the world's wealthiest nations per capita, it is also one of  ..

Read more at:
https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas/energy-rich-qatar-faces-fast-rising-climate-change-risks-at-home/95809175?redirect=1

Economic Times

Energy-rich Qatar faces fast-rising climate change risks at home 

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the world's largest coral reef ecosystem and one of its most biodiverse, is under significant threat from climate change and should be placed on a list of world heritage sites in danger, a United Nations-backed mission has recommended.

U.N. Mission Joins Growing Calls to Label Great Barrier Reef 'In Danger'

Rising temperatures are causing longer fire seasons and heavier rainfall events in Australia, a new report says. Greenhouse gases have caused Australia's climate to warm up by about 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past century, according to a new government report, resulting in larger and more frequent fires, heavier rainfall and flash floods, as well as an increase in mass coral bleaching events.

Al Jazeera

'No good news' for Australia amid forecasts of larger bushfires

"N rains had really come," writes Chinua Achebe, in "Things Fall Apart", a novel set in 19th-century Nigeria, "so heavy and persistent that even the village rainmaker no longer claimed to be able to intervene.

The Economist

Weather is again determining economic outcomes

A new study suggests climate change may result in lower rates of human conception. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer babies born.

Forbes

Could Climate Change Result In Fewer Unwanted Pregnancies?

Green energy experts at USwitch have used artificial intelligence (AI) to visualize what the world could look like in 2100. The team used Midjourney, an AI software that creates images from text descriptions, to visually depict the best- and worst-case scenarios for how 20 famous places across the globe could look in the next 80 years. These places included Amsterdam, London, New York, Tokyo, Toronto and more.

AI reveals how climate change will impact our cities

Snow-capped peaks, glaciers, powdery slopes, and rustic huts serving hot drinks: Austria's appeal as an alpine tourist destination results in almost 60mn overnight stays each winter, with the influx of visitors swelling many villages' populations tenfold.

Financial Times

Austria's ski resorts feel the heat on climate change

Experts say the approval of new infrastructure in geologically vulnerable areas is endangering the lives of residents


The Guardian

Why new construction projects are making Puerto Rico's climate disasters worse

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Heavy rains that led to recent deadly floods in Nigeria and neighboring countries were made about 80 times more likely by human caused climate change, scientists said Wednesday.

Climate Change Contributed to Deadly West African Floods, Scientists Find

Stark findings add pressure on Cop27 negotiators to deliver meaningful funding to vulnerable countries


Devastating floods in Nigeria were 80 times more likely because of climate crisis

Prime Minister Gaston Brown, of Antigua and Barbuda, has angrily rejected the idea his people should be forced to migrate, and warned that climate diplomacy is failing to act with anything like the urgency needed

Sky News

COP27: Antigua's PM asks 'Why should we live somewhere else?' as he says his people don't want to become climate refugees

As the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season entered its final month, utilities in the U.S. Southeast may have been tempted to exhale.

E&E News

4 questions answered: Hurricanes and the grid

The report, which was released Friday amidst the COP27 UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, found that there is now a 50 percent chance that we will burn past the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature goal in just nine years if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current levels.

EcoWatch

Global Carbon Budget Will Be Spent in 9 Years at Current Emissions Rate, Study Finds - EcoWatch

Women in the Global South should be "leaders, not victims'" of climate action, COP27 campaigners have urged.

Euronews

Global South women should be 'leaders, not victims' in climate crisis

It was a total loss -- the type that is usually glossed over in big impersonal statistics like $40 billion in damage from this summer's Pakistan floods that put one-third of the nation underwater.

The Independent

Cop27 loss and damage: Fight over human harm, huge climate costs

Fresh data released at the climate summit show global carbon emissions soaring despite energy crisis.


Nature

Warning from COP27: fossil-fuel emissions have hit a new high

John Kerry, President Biden's climate envoy, on Wednesday intends to announce a program that his advisers say could inject tens of billions of private dollars into the economies of developing countries struggling to replace coal, oil and gas with wind, solar and other renewable power.

A draft report offers the starkest view yet of climate threats in the U.S.

Harvests of the fungi are plummeting as Europe gets drier, pushing the prices of some varieties to eye-watering heights.

Wired

Truffles Are Becoming Even More Expensive. Blame Climate Change

WASHINGTON -- The effects of climate change are already "far-reaching and worsening" throughout all regions in the United States, posing profound risks to virtually every aspect of society, whether it's drinking water supplies in the Midwest or small businesses in the Southeast, according to a draft scientific report being circulated by the federal government.

Draft Report Offers Starkest View Yet of U.S. Climate Threats

Countries scrambling this year to source more natural gas to replace supplies from Russia are risking years of emissions that could thwart climate goals, according to the research collaboration, Climate Action Tracker.

Reuters

World's dash for natural gas endangers climate goals

For the first time, the worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.

Moneycontrol

What is implementation COP, and how is the Russia Ukraine war driving the world towards cleaner energy

One-third of World Heritage sites possessing glaciers will lose their ice by mid-century, according to a U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report. In addition, even if global warming is curbed below 1.5 degrees this would still happen. 



Key World Heritage sites will lose their glaciers by 2050

The United Nations secretary general issued a stark warning Monday, telling attendees at the COP27 summit that the world was losing its fight against climate change while also repeating his call to phase-out coal by the year 2040.

CNBC

We’re on a ‘highway to climate hell,' UN chief Guterres says, calling for a global phase-out of coal

The UN's climate change summit has opened in Egypt with a warning that our planet is "sending a distress signal".



COP27: 'Climate chaos' warning as UN summit begins

It’s a year since the world came to Glasgow for the COP26 climate conference. On the eve of COP27 the world is looking very different.


The Scotsman

COP27: We are heading towards multiple tipping points on climate change - further fossil fuel extraction is simply unethical 

This is loss and damage — irreversible climate-related devastation that cannot be mitigated or adapted to. Dealing with it is pushing developing countries into ever-greater debt and their economies to the brink of collapse. The African Development Bank reported in September that the continent is losing between 5% and 15% of its growth in gross domestic product per capita each year because of climate change.

At COP 27, support poorest for climate loss and damage

From the seemingly inexorable increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to the rapid growth in green energy


The climate crisis explained in 10 charts

A woman stands next to a cooking stove outside her home as flood waters reach above her waist.


Climate Home News

Bangladeshis are dealing with wave after wave of climate chaos

Climate change and human activity have impacts that ripple through all ecosystems. 

Jellyfish are taking over the oceans due to climate change

When world leaders descend on Egypt this month for the UN-sponsored COP27 climate talks, they’ll be stepping into a country that’s already living in the searing future. The country is warming faster than the rest of the planet — making it a bellwether for the painful effects of climate change. 



Bloomberg

Egypt Is Living in the Brutal Future the World Wants to Avoid

UN World Meteorological Organization warns that even 'well prepared societies are not safe' from climate change impacts.


Europe warming at twice the global average, UN report warns

Climate migration can be the subject of toxic narratives in the global north, but in the global south it is already changing lives. As COP27 opens in Egypt, we spoke to Kenyans experiencing the damages of an exceptional drought.



Unearthed

How climate change is forcing Kenyan women to leave their homes behind

Months After the Floods, Eastern Kentucky Families Take Measure of What Was Lost
With hundreds of houses damaged or even washed away, a question looms in parts of the region: How many families who persevered there for generations will now leave for good?

Months After the Floods, Eastern Kentucky Families Take Measure of What Was Lost

Last year's Glasgow Climate Pact urged countries to increase their ambition. Few have.

Grist

Report: Global climate ambitions still fall short ahead of COP27

Five years ago, the journalist David Wallace-Wells explored a worst-case scenario for climate change: one in which the planet warmed by as much as 5 degrees Celsius by 2100 -- causing widespread extreme weather, economic collapse, famine and war.

The Climate's Improved Future

The government must "get a grip" on "major national security risks" posed by the impacts of the worsening climate crisis on many areas of critical national infrastructure, a cross-party committee of MPs and peers has said.

Government must 'get a grip' on security risks posed by climate crisis

The planet is heading for "climate catastrophe", the UN has warned as a report showed how far off track nations are on cutting global warming pollution.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released its annual Emissions Gap report on Thursday, showing that current commitments by governments to curb the rise of global temperature are "woefully inadequate".

UN warns the planet is heading for 'climate catastrophe'

Climate change is severely impacting people's health around the world, a report by a leading medical publication has found.



COP27: Climate change threatening global health

Countries must re-prioritise climate change or the world faces catastrophe, the UN chief has told BBC News.



COP27: Prioritise climate or face catastrophe - UN chief

‘This is a sobering moment and we are in a race against time’



World is on crash course to 2.5C warming, UN warns ahead of Cop27

High-level talks under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be held in Canada this December, with representatives from 196 members gathering to decide how to halt biodiversity loss by 2030.

Mongabay

Humans are decimating wildlife, report warns ahead of U.N. biodiversity talks

From deadly floods in Nigeria to devastating drought in Somalia, Africa has faced a run of severe - and sometimes unprecedented - extreme weather events since the start of 2022. But while the US hurricane season and 40C heat in the UK have captured headlines, many of Africa's most extreme and life-changing weather events went largely unreported in global-north media.

Carbon Brief 

Africa's unreported extreme weather in 2022 and climate change

Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods and fires are putting food production at risk.



Green Queen

Chilli Peppers, Coffee, Wine: How the Climate Crisis is Causing Food Shortages

The climate crisis is also a children's rights crisis: one in four children globally are already affected by the climate emergency and by 2050 virtually every child in every region will face more frequent heatwaves, according to a new Unicef report.

Virtually all children on Earth will face more frequent heatwaves by 2050

There is a “large consensus” across all published studies that developing new oil and gas fields is “incompatible” with the 1.5C target, a new report says.

The findings, from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), are based on a comprehensive review of all “feasible” routes to staying below 1.5C.

New fossil fuels ‘incompatible’ with 1.5C goal, comprehensive analysis finds

Can we stop Europe from burning every summer? Will wildfires spread further as the planet warms? Is your city, your town, or your village more at risk today than a decade ago?

Climate Now: How do we beat wildfires?

Environmental activists have slammed a rule change by the Forest Stewardship Council that will allow some loggers who couldn't qualify over the past 30 years to now be certified sustainable.

With FSC rule change, deforesters once blocked from certification get a new shot

Climate Change | Effects

New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it!

Why California's $46 Billion Wine Industry Is Better Prepared For Climate Change Than Some Of Its Competitors?

Climate activists glued themselves to the tarmac at Berlin Brandenberg Airport (BER) and blocked both runways on November 24, 2022.

When Does Climate Activism Become Climate Terrorism?

A historic fund to help vulnerable countries worst affected by climate change was adopted at the COP27 summit. Wealthy nations have long refused to compensate poor countries struggling to cope with the effects of climate change, fearing legal liability.


Will rich nations pay for the climate 'loss and damage' fund?

At a suburban park near Doha, the capital city of Qatar, cool air from vents in the ground blasted joggers on a November day that reached almost 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

Energy-rich Qatar faces fast-rising climate risks at home

Hundreds of plans for the recovery of threatened species will reach their use-by date in the next six months as the government considers how to reform Australia's flawed system of environmental protections.

Hundreds of threatened species recovery plans expiring in next six months

Indigenous delegates warmly welcomed the creation of a loss and damage fund which they say will greatly help Indigenous communities already impacted by climate change.

Words that didn't make the cut: What happened to Indigenous rights at COP27

Cites treaty, adopted in 1963, protects more than 500 species, many exploited by unsustainable or illegal trade. An international wildlife conference has moved to enact some of the most significant protection for sharks, songbirds and scores of turtles, lizards and frogs.

Sharks, songbirds and species depleted by pet trade given extra protections

This issue includes features on disability and activism, biodiversity for wellbeing, how we can stop businesses from harming the planet, and top climate stories from around the world.

Friends of the Earth

Earthmatters Autumn 2022

By 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may face water shortages. From adjusting the weather to pulling water from thin air, innovative technology is being used to help find a sustainable supply of drinking water for the world.

Using technology to make it rain

This year's summit was set against a backdrop of record-high levels of hunger and multi-year droughts that continue to grip many parts of the continent.

COP27: Key outcomes for food, forests, land and nature at the UN climate talks in Egypt

Austria is already one of the greenest economies in Europe. But, with the Greens now part of the governing coalition, money flowing in as part of the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the country issuing green bonds, there are plans to make it greener.

Austria steps up funding to accelerate green progress

COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh were meant to end on Friday, but have run into the weekend because of deep divisions between nations.

COP27: What are the sticking points in COP27 negotiations?

Animals can adapt quickly to survive adverse environmental conditions. Evidence is mounting to show that plants can, too. An article details how plants are rapidly adapting to the adverse effects of climate change, and how they are passing down these adaptations to their offspring.


Science Daily

Plants use their epigenetic memories to adapt to climate change

Countries at the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt have adopted a final agreement that establishes a fund to help poor nations cope with the extreme weather events caused by global warming.

Historic 'loss and damage' fund adopted at COP27 climate summit

Nations reached a landmark deal to compensate developing nations for climate harm. But some leaders said the summit didn’t go far enough in addressing the root causes of global warming.

U.N. Climate Talks End With a Deal to Pay Poor Nations for Damage

Friday, November 18 marks the final day of COP27 - the United Nations 27 annual Climate Change conference. Each year this conference convenes leaders from nearly 200 nations. And each year, the stakes are higher.

Adaptive Strategies Lead To A Sustainable Future Where People And Nature Thrive

South Africa has the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of unemployment and inequality in the world. It is also one of the world’s most emissions-intensive economies, measured in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of economic output.

The Conversation

South Africa can reduce emissions and create jobs. A tough task, but doable

Farmers struggle to make ends meet in unpredictable weather that has become the ‘new normal’


Egypt battles climate change as world's eyes turn to COP27

How will life on Earth and the ecosystems that support it adapt to climate change? 

The study of evolution is fracturing – and that may be a good thing

As it moves to increase its climate adaptation finance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has launched the EBRD Climate Adaptation Action Plan (CAAP) at COP27, the global climate summit taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

EBRD

Launch of EBRD Climate Adaptation Action Plan at COP27

Contributing to the growing momentum around food and agriculture at COP27— and in a groundbreaking moment for the Conference of the Parties— Egypt (in its role as COP27 Presidency) and the World Health Organization have launched the Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN), an initiative to integrate the global delivery of climate change adaptation and mitigation policy action and nutrition and sustainable food systems to support bi-directional, mutually beneficial outcomes.



Groundbreaking Nutrition-Climate Initiative Launched At COP27

Climate change is landing blow after blow upon humanity and the planet, an onslaught that will only intensify in the coming years even if the world begins to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. 

UN Environment Programme

Adaptation Gap Report

It's been a whirlwind first week at COP27, with major new commitments on cleantech and adaptation but ongoing rows over fossil fuels and loss and damage. Recap 11 key takeaways here.

Edie

From loss and damage debates to clampdowns on greenwashing: 11 key takeaways from the first week of COP27

‘Cash, Coal, Cars and Trees to keep the world to 1.5 degrees’ was the mantra at COP26.

Lexology

Road to COP27: Adaptation - action on energy transition pledges

A group of over 85 insurers in Africa has pledged to create a financing facility to provide $14 billion of cover to help the continent's most vulnerable communities deal with climate disaster risks such as floods and droughts.

African insurers take up climate change fight with $14 bln pledge

According to a recent study published by the Adaptation Fund, youth have much more to offer their communities and countries in multilevel climate action. Specifically, youth assume several roles in adaptation projects including as builders, knowledge brokers, and community guardians and yet empowerment of young people, the report finds, still has a long way to go.

Youth engagement is pivotal to climate adaptation programmes

If successful, this new crop of activists-turned-politicians could affect climate action from state to local levels.

From New York to Texas, climate candidates are gaining momentum

 COP27 President Shoukry announces the Sharm el-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda –  a comprehensive, shared agenda to rally global action around 30 adaptation outcomes that are needed to address the adaptation gap and achieve a resilient world by 2030

UN Climate Change

Real World Actors Share Progress and Strengthen Resolve at Opening of Global Climate Action Agenda at COP27

Economic development is the only proven path to climate resilience.


Foreign Policy

The Obvious Climate Strategy Nobody Will Talk About

Contentious opening to UN climate conference as delegates struggle to reach agreement on discussion of loss and damage



Cop27 gets off to delayed start after tussle over agenda for talks

As climate change threatens global food supplies, countries will need to increase the efficiency of food production, bringing about short-term gains, such as decreased deforestation, but long-term risks, including future pandemics stemming from animal-borne diseases, finds a new analysis.


Intensified meat production in response to climate change would bring short-term rewards, long-term risks

Although Africa has contributed the least to global carbon emissions, the continent remains the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and African needs for climate finance and adaptation are among the greatest.

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