With its population of nearly 160 million people, Bangladesh is the eighth most populous country in the world. Its geography – tropical, low-lying, with a sizable coastline – make the country one of the most vulnerable to climate change. Rising sea levels, increased cyclone intensity and frequency, and higher temperatures all pose threats to an […]
Columbia World Projects‘ first project, Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday), aims to combat hunger and improve food security by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations —Ethiopia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala. The project is led […]
A new study finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been responsible for widespread, simultaneous crop failures in recent history, running counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions are unrelated.
Written by Christopher Shea, Columbia World Projects Early one evening in 1987, a fire sparked by a passenger’s lit match broke out in London’s Kings Cross station, injuring 100 people and killing more than 30. Anti-smoking activists, lobbyists and politicians went rapidly to work and within two years London’s smoking regulations had been tightened and […]
The project transforms Rwanda’s rural communities and economy through climate information and historic data reconstruction. The Rwanda Climate Services for Agriculture project has won the first Climate Smart Agriculture Project of the Year Award. The Aid & International Development Forum announced the news at its Africa Climate Smart Agriculture Summit in Nairobi earlier this week. The Rwanda […]
The below is an excerpt from a blog written by IRI staff members James Hansen, Alison Rose and Dannie Dinh and originally appearing on the CCAFS website. On World Meteorological Day, we highlight how CCAFS and partners are supporting national meteorological services in African countries to provide actionable local climate information to farmers. The important contributions […]
Findings spur Nigerian government to look into solutions to cover 15 million farmers by 2017 LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (26 January 2015) — Nigerian government officials will convene in London this week to gather advice for scaling-up agricultural insurance policies for smallholder farmers, to bolster the up and coming agricultural powerhouse’s resilience to climate and market shocks. The meeting […]
As an ‘El Niño’ climate event heats up in the Pacific, the spotlight is on how we can prepare for the weather and climate shifts that may be in store. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a kind of pendulum in the global climate system, swinging back and forth on a 2-7 year cycle, bringing drought to some areas […]
By Caitlin Kopcik Rising global food prices and favorable rainfall patterns in recent decades have allowed farmers in South America’s Southern Cone region to grow crops on formerly marginal lands. But if climate patterns shift and the rains start to fail, the region could face devastating losses in its economy, livelihoods and infrastructure. The IRI […]