Millions living near the coast are likely to be hit by rising sea levels, erosion and storm surges, warns a new study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
I slept in my clothes last night, on the bare wooden floor of one of the houses the first boatload of people to be evacuated from the Carteret Islands are building for their families. It was a jet-black night in the small clearing hacked out amid the jungle, the dark broken only by our two candles and the lights of Fireflies jigging in the trees.
The disappearance of Lohachara beneath the waters of the Bay of Bengal created the world’s first environmental refugees. Dan McDougall reports on other islanders in the Sundarbans delta who have no escape from the rising ocean. Photography by Robin Hammond
One of the most memorable parts of Al Gore’s film 'An Inconvenient Truth' was the cartoon polar bear trying to climb on the last piece of sea-ice in the Arctic, failing, and despondently swimming off into the sunset. With scientists this week reporting that autumn Arctic sea-ice coverage reached a record low this year, Al Gore’s cartoon may not be as far-fetched as it seems.
Arctic sea ice is melting faster than climate models predicted and there is less sea ice in the Arctic now than at any time since records began, scientists from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) have discovered.
Russia last week planted a flag on the Arctic seabed while the Canadian Prime Minister announced $57 million plans to establish military control over a key future Arctic shipping route, in symbolic moves to seize previously inaccessible Arctic fossil fuel reserves.
The scenario depicted in the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, in which global warming triggers a new ice-age in the Northern hemisphere is unlikely to happen according to new scientific data.
The IPCC, a UN based organisation made up of over 1200 climate experts from 40 countries and the most respected global authority on Climate Change science, has said the rise in global temperatures could be as high as 6.4°C by 2100. The report also predicts sea level rises and increases in the frequency of hurricanes.
Sir Nicholas Stern was asked to find out what way of averting climate change was economically feasible. A loaded question that has allowed him to find a perverse solution to a fatal problem.
It takes no more than a gentle nudge to push a man over the edge of a cliff, but it is almost impossible to haul him back before he hits the ground. Given that we show no sign of putting a stop to global warming, Peter Bunyard takes a look at what the future might hold
This month a construction consortium will start pouring millions of tons of rock and cement into the Venice Lagoon – one of the Mediterranean’s most important wetlands. The consortium claims the dam project will ‘save’ the city from flooding. But the project failed its environmental impact assessment, threatens the ecology of the lagoon and – with global warming and rising sea-levels –may not even protect Venice anyway. Tony Zamparutti reports from Italy.