Resource conflict and ecosystem diplomacy in bullet point updates – since 2008
Pamela Anderson is nominated for quote of the year: I do not think the poor should pay for climate change. Yet it is the poor who are paying the biggest price. Some say that the protesters in France protested so they could continue polluting the planet. But I do not think this is true. They…
During the first eleven months of 2018, almost five thousand people were killed and almost 29 million people affected in climate breakdown incidents, The Guardian recounts in an informative graphic. Islamic State has systematically wrecked the environment from territories they have fled. It’s yet another war crime, actually. “The worst thing is when you destroy…
Supply of neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium, praseodymium, other rare minerals – and silver – must grow twelvefold by 2050. Else the demand for production of solar panels, rechargeable batteries and other technologies needed for sustainable energies is not met. Furthermore, Europe and USA are overwhelmingly dependent on China, especially, as well as Turkey and Australia…
It’s COP24 times, so… The New Zealand military is preparing. Climate change will be one of the greatest security challenges for New Zealand Defence in the coming decades […] The links between climate change are indirect but demonstrable … [the impacts] will require more humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief, stability operations and search and rescue…
The climate crisis poses a constant threat to global security. This is a threat that we face, not years from now, but today. We owe it to our brave soldiers on the front lines, and at the ready at home & abroad, to recognize this threat & act to solve it. https://t.co/kXmTueR7Ry — Al Gore…
The water supplying many of Kyrgyzstan’s farmers flows from Uzbekistan. Rarely there is enough for everyone. The water comes from glaciers that are disappearing. “During the summer time, there are daily conflicts over irrigation water […] They are usually between villages, sometimes inter-ethnic and people have killed each other over irrigation water.” Tynar Musabaev, executive…
New calculation: Air pollution causes more than 500,000 premature deaths in Europe every year. Although it might feel like we heard this accounting of subjective violence before. What also bears repetition is that climate change creates conflict and that the Middle East risks a water wars. His body was bloodied, swollen, and just lying there……
My handful of primitive news collecting helpers have unceremoniously done their work for another week. So, I bid you welcome to a short summary of the highlights produced by yours truly over a blended Scotch in a dark and quiet Sunday evening hour. A large group of desperate Central Americans are walking towards the US…
When I think about our engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, in Somalia, in other places of the world, I see that climate change has already had a massive impact on population movement, on fertility of land. It’s moving the border between pastoralist and agriculturalist. […] It’s very obvious that some of the violence that we are…
They can kill me at any moment, but they are going to regret it forever because, after I’m dead, others will take my place. Aluisio ‘Alenquer’ Sampaio Alenquer was shot and killed Thursday the 11th of October 2018. He was a campaigner for family farm rights in Brazil, and had received death threats for years…
US “First Lady” Melania Trump went to Africa wearing the very symbol of colonialism. While this inspired some criticism, Elliot Ross found it to be perfectly fitting. Beginning in Arabic, Foreign Minister of Austria, Karin Kneissl, held her speech at the UN General Assembly in multiple languages. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a…
In the English Channel, British and French fishermen have clashed in the Scallop War. In the absence of fishery management, climate change might lead to more fish wars, argues Kathleen McGinty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s new special report on 1.5°C warming is alarming. But the summary for policymakers is not nearly alarming…