News

We are living in what can only be described as interesting times: a debt-fuelled economic crisis, the looming peak and decline of global oil production, and the potential loss of a climate system able conducive to stable, flourishing societies.
The Art of Rapid Transition was a series of five extraordinary events hosted by nef at the Hay Literary Festival in 2009. They were inspired by the admission by the former Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan that: “I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works”.

Conservation doesn't happen in a vacuum. This report illustrates the growing awareness in recent years of the relationship of international conservation practice to indigenous peoples and local communities, and especially the links between conservation and human rights. The impacts protected areas can have on rural communities - such as evictions and lost access to natural resources - are now under particular scrutiny. Concern is meanwhile rising over the human rights implications of some climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.

New draft paper by James Hansen co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has just been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, it tackles head on the unique pressures facing climate science at the moment, namely, calls from a doubting public and media for climatologists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0601.pdf

'File this under "stories that shouldn't be news, but are": Three new reports by the highly respected National Research Council, a subsidiary of the National Academy of Sciences, argue that climate change is real and driven by human influences.'
http://environment.change.org/blog/view/new_studies_provide_further_proo...

Thanks Dave K for spotting this interesting paper.
ABSTRACT

Community food enterprises can play a role in helping to tackle the challenge of climate change through empowering local people and communities to take action. This is the main message from this new report, which identifies the potential for communities on a local level across England to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every part of the food chain, including transport. The report was launched at the Making Local Food Work for People and Planet Conference.

The Hartwell Paper
London School of Economics & Oxford University
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27939/1/HartwellPaper_English_version.pdf
After the failure of the international climate policy meeting at Copenhagen last December, LSE Mackinder and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, were commissioned by an international consortium of funders to chart a new way forward.

Climate change could make much of the world too hot for human habitation within just three centuries, research released Tuesday showed.
Scientists from Australia's University of New South Wales and Purdue University in the United States found that rising temperatures in some places could mean humans would be unable to adapt or survive.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-may-be-too-hot-for-humans...
and
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/04/26/0913352107.abstract?sid=ed5...

There is increasing awareness of the important benefits that ecosystems provide and growing concern that these ecosystem services are being degraded as a result of human activities. This was the subject of a recent study by Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), in collaboration with Alterra, for DG Environment. The study examined the potential impacts of land use change to 2030 on four land services, namely food production, water (retention and quality), soil carbon and biodiversity.

The world's governments will not meet their internationally-agreed target of curbing the loss of species and nature by 2010, a major study has confirmed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10092320.stm
http://www.twentyten.net/